ces as death and life are
commonplace--form their motives. For my part I am unable to find the
slightest interest or the most rudimentary importance in the questions
whether the Mr. W. H. of the dedication was the Earl of Pembroke, and if
so, whether he was also the object of the majority of the _Sonnets_;
whether the "dark lady," the "woman coloured ill," was Miss Mary Fitton;
whether the rival poet was Chapman. Very likely all these things are true:
very likely not one of them is true. They are impossible of settlement, and
if they were settled they would not in the slightest degree affect the
poetical beauty and the human interest of the _Sonnets_, which, in a
strange _reductio ad absurdum_ of eighteenth century commonsense criticism,
Hallam thought it impossible not to wish that Shakespere had not written,
and which some critics, not perhaps of the least qualified, have regarded
as the high-water mark of English, if not of all, poetry.

This latter estimate will only be dismissed as exaggerated by those who are
debarred from appreciation by want of sympathy with the subject, or
distracted by want of comprehension of it. A harmony of the two chief
opposing theories of poetry will teach us that we must demand of the very
highest poetry first--the order is not material--a certain quality of
expression, and secondly, a certain quality of subject. "What that quality
of subject must be has been, as it seems to me, crudely and wrongly stated,
but rightly indicated, in Mr. Matthew Arnold's formula of the "Criticism
of Life." That is to say, in less debatable words, the greatest poet must
show most knowledge of human nature. Now both these conditions are
fulfilled in the sonnets of Shakespere with a completeness and intensity
impossible to parallel elsewhere. The merits of the formal and expressive
part hardly any one will now question; the sonnets may be opened almost at
random with the certainty of finding everywhere the phrases, the verses,
the passages which almost mechanically recur to our minds when we are asked
to illustrate the full poetical capacity and beauty of the English tongue,
such as:

"The painful warrior, famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foiled,
Is from the book of honour razed quite
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled;"

or

"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past;"

or

"Was it the proud full sail o