personage seemed most divine,
A thousand graces one might count
Upon his lovely cheerful eyne.
To heare him speak and sweetly smile
You were in Paradise the while.

Edmund Spenser in a fine sonnet told his patron, Admiral Lord Charles
Howard, that 'his good personage and noble deeds' made him the pattern to
the present age of the old heroes of whom 'the antique poets' were 'wont
so much to sing.' This compliment, which Shakespeare turns to splendid
account in Sonnet cvi., recurs constantly in contemporary sonnets of
adulation. {140a} Ben Jonson apostrophised the Earl of Desmond as 'my
best-best lov'd.' Campion told Lord Walden, the Earl of Suffolk's
undistinguished heir, that although his muse sought to express his love,
'the admired virtues' of the patron's youth

Bred such despairing to his daunted Muse
That it could scarcely utter naked truth. {140b}

Dr. John Donne includes among his 'Verse Letters' to patrons and
patronesses several sonnets of similar temper, one of which,
acknowledging a letter of news from a patron abroad, concludes thus:

And now thy alms is given, thy letter's read,
The body risen again, the which was dead,
And thy poor starveling bountifully fed.
After this banquet my soul doth say grace,
And praise thee for it and zealously embrace
Thy love, though I think thy love in this case
To be as gluttons', which say 'midst their meat
They love that best of which they most do eat. {141}

The tone of yearning for a man's affection is sounded by Donne and
Campion almost as plaintively in their sonnets to patrons as it was
sounded by Shakespeare. There is nothing, therefore, in the vocabulary
of affection which Shakespeare employed in his sonnets of friendship to
conflict with the theory that they were inscribed to a literary patron
with whom his intimacy was of the kind normally subsisting at the time
between literary clients and their patrons.

Direct references to Southampton in the sonnets of friendship.

We know Shakespeare had only one literary patron, the Earl of
Southampton, and the view that that nobleman is the hero of the sonnets
of 'friendship' is strongly corroborated by such definite details as can
be deduced from the vague eulogies in those poems of the youth's gifts
and graces. Every compliment, in fact, paid by Shakespeare to the youth,
whether it be vaguely or definitely phrased, applies to Southampton
without