tory way, Shakespeare was doing purely experimental apprentice work; in "The Comedy of Errors" he indulged his exuberant humour to the full; in "Love's Labour's Lost" he lightly but keenly satirized the foibles and extravagances of his time in learning, speech, and style; in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" he made a slender plot bear the weight of his dawning imagination in image and phrase; in "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece" he surrendered himself to the lyric impulse; and in the "Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Romeo and Juliet" his poetic genius rose to its full height. In these two dramas, which belong in the front rank of English poetry, fancy and imagination are seen in that creative play with the materials of experience and of ideality which fashions worlds as substantial as that on which we live, and yet touched with a beauty of form and a lucidity of meaning which we search for in vain in the world of reality.

The stages of Shakespeare's growth as a poet are as clearly marked as the stages of his growth as a dramatist. Between "Venus and Adonis" and "Romeo and Juliet" there intervened several years of experience, observation, experimentation, and unfolding. The freedom of movement, the fulness of imagination, the firm grasp of subject, and the masterly handling of material of all kinds which are characteristic of the later work did not come at call in Shakepeare's case; he was subject to the law of development and dependent upon education for the full possession of himself and the free use of his powers. In the

earlier poems there are passages of unsurpassed beauty, but in construction and style the hand of the apprentice is manifest. As he had gone to school to the older playwrights when he set about the business of writing plays, so he went to school to the older poets when he began to write poetry. The spell of the classical ideal of beauty was on all sensitive minds when Shakespeare was young; those who emancipated themselves from the classical tradition of poetic and dramatic form did not detach themselves from the poetic conceptions and the beautiful world of imagery which Europe recovered in the Renaissance. The joy of release from mediæval rigidity and repression found its natural expression in reverence for the models and standards of classical art. Man had been born again into conscious freedom; personality had once more secured space and light for development; to the monotony of the type in the arts had succeeded the range and variety of individuality; love of nature and joy in her presence had returned; confidence in the human spirit had been restored when the shadows of a world lying under the ban of heaven had been banished; an immense exhilaration of imagination, a great liberation of personal force, were the fruits of the freedom of mind and soul which the Renaissance secured. Looking back across the Middle Ages, associated in the minds of the men of the new time with spiritual repression and intellectual bondage, the classical world lay clear, beautiful, and free in a light that was almost dazzling after the long gloom of medievalism. It is true mediævalism had its lights, its humour,

its beauty of devotion, its deep-rooted and noble art; but the men of the Renaissance were in reaction against its repression of natural instincts, its curtailment of natural activities, and they saw the classical world in the high light of sharp contrast. That world is marvellously beautiful to the imagination of the nineteenth century, which constantly recalls it in every art and strives with passionate eagerness to recover its lost perfection of taste, of order, of workmanship; to the imagination of the sixteenth century it was the golden age of the arts and of the spirit which fashions them a lost but immortal world of freedom, joy, beauty, and creativeness.

Shakespeare had known this older world from boyhood. He was not subjugated by it, as were many of his contemporaries, for beneath the sensitive surface of his mind there was a vigorous and self-sustaining individuality; but he felt its spell and discerned its educational uses. He knew his Ovid early enough to people the Forest of Arden with the older dreams of poetry; but it was characteristic of his genius that he did not confuse the one with the other. In "Venus and Adonis" the great passages are not those which describe the beautiful goddess or the shy and radiant youth, but those which describe figures, landscapes, and incidents which he must have seen or known in the country about Stratford in his youth.

His earliest poetic experiments were in the classical vein; for he knew the classical background of modern poetry as intimately as did Keats. He began his poetic career under the tutelage of one of the most

imaginative of the Roman poets. In the early summer of 1593, with the imprint of his friend and fellow-townsman, Richard Field, on the title-page, Shakespeare made his first appeal to the reading public of his time, and his first venture in what he and his contemporaries recognized as literature. He had already made some reputation as a playwright; but plays were not then regarded as literature. Columbus died in ignorance that he had discovered a new world, so possessed was his mind with the conviction that he had touched the outlying islands of Asia. Shakespeare died in ignorance of the fact that he had made himself the foremost man in literature, so far apart in his thought and the thought of his time were plays and literature. The text of "Venus and Adonis" was carefully read, and is notably accurate; it was printed under the eye of the poet. The plays were either stolen or published in many cases without authorization, and are, for that reason, full of inaccuracies and difficult or questionable passages.

It is interesting to recall the fact, already reported, that four years earlier Richard Field had brought out the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid; and it is also worth recalling that in the year before the appearance of the "first heir" of Shakespeare's invention his father had made an appraisal of the goods of Field's father in Stratford.

"I know not how I shall offend," wrote Shakespeare in the dedication of the poem to the Earl of Southampton, “in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for

choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden, only if your Honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather." Shakespeare was twenty-nine years old, and the Earl of Southampton was in his twentieth year a young man of brilliant parts and of striking beauty; well educated; with a fortune more than adequate to his rank; a great favourite in the Court circle; a lover of literature and of the drama; a generous and appreciative friend of men of letters; and a representative man in a great and brilliant period. The two young men had been brought together by those manifold affinities which in youth ripen casual acquaintance swiftly into devoted friendship; the glow of the time was on them both, although the dawn of the noble was to be quenched in the darkness of premature night, while that of the playwright broadened into a day which is likely to know no shadow of evening.

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There has been wide difference of opinion regarding Shakespeare's meaning in describing the poem as "the first heir" of his invention. It has been urged that the words should be taken literally, and that the poem was probably composed at Stratford and carried to London, as Johnson carried, almost two centuries later, the tragedy of "Irene." Or the poet may have meant that it was his first attempt to write lyrical or narrative verse. When it appeared, no plays of his