lease in buoyant verse. {149c} It is improbable that Shakespeare
remained silent. 'My love looks fresh,' he wrote in the concluding lines
of Sonnet cvii., and he repeated the conventional promise that he had so
often made before, that his friend should live in his 'poor rhyme,' 'when
tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.' It is impossible to
resist the inference that Shakespeare thus saluted his patron on the
close of his days of tribulation. Shakespeare's genius had then won for
him a public reputation that rendered him independent of any private
patron's favour, and he made no further reference in his writings to the
patronage that Southampton had extended to him in earlier years. But the
terms in which he greeted his former protector for the last time in verse
justify the belief that, during his remaining thirteen years of life, the
poet cultivated friendly relations with the Earl of Southampton, and was
mindful to the last of the encouragement that the young peer offered him
while he was still on the threshold of the temple of fame.

X--THE SUPPOSED STORY OF INTRIGUE IN THE SONNETS

It is hardly possible to doubt that had Shakespeare, who was more
prolific in invention than any other poet, poured out in his sonnets his
personal passions and emotions, he would have been carried by his
imagination, at every stage, far beyond the beaten tracks of the
conventional sonnetteers of his day. The imitative element in his
sonnets is large enough to refute the assertion that in them as a whole
he sought to 'unlock his heart.' It is likely enough that beneath all
the conventional adulation bestowed by Shakespeare on Southampton there
lay a genuine affection, but his sonnets to the Earl were no involuntary
ebullitions of a devoted and disinterested friendship; they were
celebrations of a patron's favour in the terminology--often raised by
Shakespeare's genius to the loftiest heights of poetry--that was
invariably consecrated to such a purpose by a current literary
convention. Very few of Shakespeare's 'sugared sonnets' have a
substantial right to be regarded as untutored cries of the soul. It is
true that the sonnets in which the writer reproaches himself with sin, or
gives expression to a sense of melancholy, offer at times a convincing
illusion of autobiographic confessions; and it is just possible that they
stand apart from the rest, and reveal the writer's inner consciousness,
in which case they are