vious year; but the friendship between the two men had apparently ripened in the intervening months. The language of dedications is rarely to be taken literally, and in Shakespeare's time, as in Johnson's, it was more notable for adulation than for sincerity; but, although Shakespeare uses the speech of the courtier in addressing his friend, there is a note of sincerity in both dedications. The second is more intimate and affectionate than its predecessor. "The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end," he writes; "... the warrant I have of your Honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance."

The subject would have permitted the most intense dramatic feeling, but, like the story in "Venus and Adonis," it is presented not only with entire objectivity but with a certain coolness and aloofness; as if the poet had chosen his theme rather than been chosen by it. His imagination was stimulated but not possessed by it; it is an impressive poetic exercise from the hand of a great poet rather than an original and characteristic expression of poetic genius. There are vivid impressions, scenes that stand out as if cut with the chisel, striking reflections, and, at intervals, the inimitable Shakespearean note, that magical harmony of sound and sense that rings like a bell in one's memory:

For Sorrow, like a heavy hanging bell,

Once set on ringing with his own weight goes.

But the poet is practising, not creating; learning his art, not enlarging it. It is in detached passages, not

in the completed work, that we must look for the poet of "Romeo and Juliet." In "The Rape of Lucrece" there is, however, a distinct advance in seriousness and dignity; there is not only greater ease in the use of verse, but there is finer insight and higher ideality :

Who loves chaste life, there's Lucrece for a teacher:

Coleridge laid his finger on the characteristic quality of "Venus and Adonis " when he pointed out the fact that the reader of the poem is told nothing; he sees and hears everything. The dramatic element was too pronounced in Shakespeare's nature, even at a time when the poetic impulse was in the ascendant, to permit of the highest success in purely narrative verse; in any event, he did not stamp these poems with that finality of form which he put on many of the plays and on a large group of the sonnets. The earliest pieces of his original work betray the immaturity of his genius and art; they show him under the spell of the Renaissance spirit; they deal with passion without being passionate. Their significance in the history of his development has been discerned by Coleridge in a passage memorable in Shakespearean criticism:

"The Venus and Adonis did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favour, and even demand, their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakespeare's management of the tale neither pathos nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspired by the

same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and con tracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, and a wider range of knowledge and reflection: and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language. What, then, shall we say? Even this, that Shakespeare, no mere child of nature, no automaton of genius, no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it, first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer, not rival.”

It is impossible, even in work distinctly sensuous in imagery, not to discern the idealist in Shakespeare. Dealing with the physical aspects of beauty in "Venus and Adonis," he is bent on the ideal beauty. With Plato and Michael Angelo, he is driven by the appearance of beauty to that invisible and eternal reality which is at once the inspiration and justification of religion and poetry. In his earliest thought the future writer of the sonnets discerned the reality of which all beautiful faces, aspects, and images are the passing reflections, the fleeting remembrances and prophecies.

The publication of these poems gave Shakespeare another constituency and a new group of friends, and brought him recognition and reputation. In the eight years which followed its appearance no less than seven editions of "Venus and Adonis" were.

issued, and "The Rape of Lucrece " was in its fifth edition when the poet died. In exchanging the writing of plays for the writing of poems the poet passed from an occupation which shared to a considerable extent the social indifference or contempt which attached to the actor's profession to one in which gentlemen were proud to engage. He became, for the time being, a man of letters; he thought of readers rather than of hearers; he gave his work the care and finish of intentional authorship. He had become known to the theatre-going people as an actor of skill and an adapter of plays of uncommon parts; he now became known as a poet. Writing four years later, Richard Barnfield comments on "the honeyflowing vein" of Shakespeare,

Whose "Venus" and whose "Lucrece,” sweet and chaste, Thy name in fame's immortal book have plac't;

and in an oft-quoted passage, which appeared in the same year, Francis Meres, in his "Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets," uses these striking words, expressive at once of the impression which Shakespeare had made upon his contemporaries and of his association in their minds with the Latin poet upon whom he had drawn freely in both poems: "As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends. " A year later John Weever

calls Shakespeare "honie-tongued." At Cambridge in the same year St. John's College heard a fellowplaywright declare, "I'll worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare, and, to honour him, will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillow." That Shakespeare had become so well known that the readers of his poems and the hearers of his plays were divided on the question of the relative importance of his works is shown, a little later, by these words of Gabriel Harvey written, Mr. Gollancz tells us, on the fly-leaf of a Chaucer folio: "The younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis; but his Lucrece, and his tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them to please the wiser sort." These references, and others of similar import, show the young poet with the earliest light of fame upon him. Life and art, friends and fame, opportunity and work, were already his. And he had been in London less than fourteen years.

The poets of his own time-Drayton, Brooke, Weever were under the spell of his genius; and there is good reason to believe Spenser was thinking of him when he wrote in "Colin Clouts come home againe ":

And then, though last not least in Aetion;

A gentler shepheard may no where be found,
Whose muse, full of high thought's invention,
Doth, like himselfe, heroically sound.

In the Christmas season of 1594 he acted at court before Queen Elizabeth, and the fact that his plays were repeatedly presented in her presence indicates