st of our
poets set himself when near the age of thirty, and to which he
presumably brought all the powers of which he was then conscious, were
the uninspired and pitilessly prolix poems of VENUS AND ADONIS and THE
RAPE OF LUCRECE, the first consisting of some 1,200 lines and the second
of more than 1,800; one a calculated picture of female concupiscence and
the other a still more calculated picture of female chastity: the two
alike abnormally fluent, yet external, unimpassioned, endlessly
descriptive, elaborately unimpressive. Save for the sexual attraction of
the subjects, on the commercial side of which the poet had obviously
reckoned in choosing them, these performances could have no unstudious
readers in our day and few warm admirers in their own, so little sign do
they give of any high poetic faculty save the two which singly go so
often without any determining superiority of mind--inexhaustible flow of
words and endless observation of concrete detail. Of the countless
thrilling felicities of phrase and feeling for which Shakspere is
renowned above all English poets, not one, I think, is to be found in
those three thousand fluently-scanned and smoothly-worded lines: on the
contrary, the wearisome succession of stanzas, stretching the succinct
themes immeasurably beyond all natural fitness and all narrative
interest, might seem to signalise such a lack of artistic judgment as
must preclude all great performance; while the apparent plan of
producing an effect by mere multiplication of words, mere extension of
description without intension of idea, might seem to prove a lack of
capacity for any real depth of passion. They were simply manufactured
poems, consciously constructed for the market, the first designed at the
same time to secure the patronage of the Maecenas of the hour, Lord
Southampton, to whom it was dedicated, and the second produced and
similarly dedicated on the strength of the success of the first. The
point here to be noted is that they gained the poet's ends. They
succeeded as saleable literature, and they gained the Earl's favour.

And the rest of the poet's literary career, from this point forward,
seems to have been no less prudently calculated. Having plenty of
evidence that men could not make a living by poetry, even if they
produced it with facility; and that they could as little count on living
steadily by the sale of plays, he joined with his trade of actor the
business not merely of playwri