s an historical character. _He takes
his place among the creatures of the poets imagination, and is far more
of a shadow or phantom than any one of them._[14]

_If we suppose_ the sonnets to be connected with real life, it is not
easy to understand why the radiant youth, "the world's fresh ornament,"
"only herald to the gaudy spring," etc., should need such an amount of
persuasion to marry. Seventeen sonnets of great poetical beauty and
felicitous language are devoted to this object. It is an exquisite treat
to read them as works of art, but taken literally they are unspeakably
absurd. No sane man would draw out such lengths of linked sweetness for
the purpose named; nor would any youth, however credulous, _take the
sonnets at their face value_. Shakespeare is merely practising his art,
and we may be perfectly sure that these "sugared" sonnets (as Meres
calls them), if they did circulate among the poet's private friends,
were regarded as rhetorical exercises. They are intensely interesting,
as showing the overpoweringly dramatic nature of Shakespeare's genius.
Being impressed with the desirability of perpetuating beauty, he is
driven to express the idea in the conventional form of a
sonnet-sequence. The result is an exhaustiveness of treatment, a wealth
of imaginative ornament, and a dramatic vividness of presentation that
makes the reader marvel how so much could be made out of so little.

[14] Mr. Lee has collected an amount of evidence which seems to
prove that T. T., _i.e._, Thomas Thorpe, who wrote the
dedication, was not only a piratical publisher, but also a
humourist. The dedication, read in the light of these
observations, acquires a character of jocularity, and _begetter_
means _procurer_ or _getter_. Thorpe thus becomes what we know
Curll to have been a century later, a printer of stolen copy,
with a turn for cynical waggery. Mr. W. H., the begetter,
accordingly, is not a glittering aristocrat, but an unscrupulous
go-between, who has made free with somebody's escritoire, and
handed the sonnets over to the gay T. T.!

XENOPHON.

There is one Greek book, of which I have gone through three or four
copies by carrying it about in the pocket for my _moments perdus_. I
refer to the _Economist_ of Xenophon, a gem of a book, and one on which
I have often lectured. The title is not an attractive one, but the body
of the work is charming in the highest degree, and gives