peculiar charm, of which their best productions are entirely destitute; and to insinuate that any of his contemporaries ever produced a play worthy of being ranked with his happiest efforts, with Othello for instance, Macbeth, Lear, or Hamlet,seems to me an absurdity almost unpardonable in any critic.98 Though Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets of Shakespeare have been cast into the shade by his dramas, and are familiar to few readers, they nevertheless deserve to be numbered among the finest compositions of the golden age of our literature. Both Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece, abound in elaborate descriptions, as vivid as language has ever conveyed, in striking thoughts, expressed with uncommon terseness, and in similes of perfect originality; while both, in accordance with the taste of the period at which they were written, are occasionally soiled by quaintness and conceit. It is to be regretted, that, for the sake of affording a contrast to the coldness of Adonis, Shakespeare should have so over-painted the passion of the Goddess, as to render several portions of the former production equally offensive to decency and good taste. The "first heir of his 93 Weber, in the Introduction to his edition of Beaumont and Fletcher's Works, expressly tells us, that Philaster "possesses excellencies little inferior" to those of Macbeth and Lear, p. xiv. invention," (as he terms Venus and Adonis) appears to me, however, more full of the ethereal spirit of poesy than The Rape of Lucrece; though it wants the pathos, the energy, and the moral grandeur, of that painful tale. In order to show what progress had been made by Englishmen in the cultivation of the Sonnet, before it engaged the pen of Shakespeare, I shall now proceed to extract some pieces from different writers, who had attempted it anterior to the year 1609.94 Among the Songes and Sonnettes, 1557, of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, is this pleasing Description of Spring, wherein each thing renews, save only the Lover: "The soote 95 season, that bud and bloom forth brings, The nightingale with feathers new she sings; The fishes flete with new repaired scale; 94 It has been already mentioned that though Shakespeare's Sonnets were not published till 1609, some of them were written as early as 1598; see p. lvi. 95 Sweet. 96 Mate. 97 Mingles. It is well known that Steevens pronounced Thomas Watson to be "a more elegant Sonnetteer than Shakespeare:" the following effusion (which is a fair specimen of Watson's talents) from the EKATOMIAеIA, or Passionate Centurie of Love, printed without date, but entered on the Stationers' Books, 1581, will show how preposterous was the decision of the commentator; who, after all, perhaps, did not declare his real opinion on the subject, as sincerity was not among his virtues : "When May is in his prime, and youthfu. Spring 98 And lovely nature smiles, and nothing lours; With night complaints, and sits in little rest. To whom fond love doth work such wrongs by day, A Vision upon this conceipt of the Faery Queen, attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, is appended to 98 Watson's Sonnets all consist of eighteen, instead of fourteen, lines. the three first books of Spenser's great poem which were printed in 1590: "Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay, At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept, Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 1586, was the wonder of his own age, and his laurels as a warrior and a poet are yet unwithered. One of the best portions of his Astrophel and Stella, which was not published till 1591, is this: "With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies, Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess? The two next pieces are from the Delia of Samuel Daniel, 1592, a writer remarkable for propriety of thought, and purity of diction, though his peculiar beauties are, I think, less conspicuous in his Sonnets than in his other works: "I once may see when years shall wreck my wrong, Then fade those flowers which deck'd her pride so long. "Look, Delia, how we 'steem the half-blown rose, |