dy pleasures cease:
She makes the Winter's storms repose in peace,
And spends her franchise on each living thing:
The daisies sprout, the little birds do sing,
Herbs, gums, and plants do vaunt of their release.
So when that all our English Wits lay dead,
(Except the laurel that is ever green)
Thou with thy Fruit our barrenness o'erspread,
And set thy flowery pleasance to be seen.
Such fruits, such flow'rets of morality,
Were ne'er before brought out of Italy.

Cf. Shakespeare's Sonnet xcviii. beginning:

When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.

But like descriptions of Spring and Summer formed a topic that was common
to all the sonnets of the period. Much has been written of Shakespeare's
alleged acquaintance with Florio. Farmer and Warburton argue that
Shakespeare ridiculed Florio in Holofernes in _Love's Labour's Lost_.
They chiefly rely on Florio's bombastic prefaces to his _Worlde of
Wordes_ and his translation of Montaigne's _Essays_ (1603). There is
nothing there to justify the suggestion. Florio writes more in the vein
of Armado than of Holofernes, and, beyond the fact that he was a teacher
of languages to noblemen, he bears no resemblance to Holofernes, a
village schoolmaster. Shakespeare doubtless knew Florio as Southampton's
_protege_, and read his fine translation of Montaigne's _Essays_ with
delight. He quotes from it in _The Tempest_: see p. 253.

{86} Shakespeare writes in his Sonnets:

My glass shall not persuade me I am old (xxii. 1.).
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity (lxii. 9-10).
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang (lxxiii. 1-2).
My days are past the best (cxxxviii. 6).

Daniel in _Delia_ (xxiii.) in 1591, when twenty-nine years old,
exclaimed:

My years draw on my everlasting night,
. . . My days are done.

Richard Barnfield, at the age of twenty, bade the boy Ganymede, to whom
he addressed his _Affectionate Shepherd_ and a sequence of sonnets in
1594 (ed. Arber, p. 23):

Behold my gray head, full of silver hairs,
My wrinkled skin, deep furrows in my face.

Similarly Drayton in a sonnet (_Idea_, xiv.) published in 1594, when he
was barely thirty-one, wrote:

Looking into the glass of my youth's miseries,
I see the ugly