the least straining of the words. In real life beauty, birth,
wealth, and wit sat 'crowned' in the Earl, whom poets acclaimed the
handsomest of Elizabethan courtiers, as plainly as in the hero of the
poet's verse. Southampton has left in his correspondence ample proofs of
his literary learning and taste, and, like the hero of the sonnets, was
'as fair in knowledge as in hue.' The opening sequence of seventeen
sonnets, in which a youth of rank and wealth is admonished to marry and
beget a son so that 'his fair house' may not fall into decay, can only
have been addressed to a young peer like Southampton, who was as yet
unmarried, had vast possessions, and was the sole male representative of
his family. The sonnetteer's exclamation, 'You had a father, let your
son say so,' had pertinence to Southampton at any period between his
father's death in his boyhood and the close of his bachelorhood in 1598.
To no other peer of the day are the words exactly applicable. The
'lascivious comment' on his 'wanton sport' which pursues the young friend
through the sonnets, and is so adroitly contrived as to add point to the
picture of his fascinating youth and beauty, obviously associates itself
with the reputation for sensual indulgence that Southampton acquired both
at Court and, according to Nash, among men of letters. {142}

His youthfulness.

There is no force in the objection that the young man of the sonnets of
'friendship' must have been another than Southampton because the terms in
which he is often addressed imply extreme youth. In 1594, a date to
which I refer most of the sonnets Southampton was barely twenty-one, and
the young man had obviously reached manhood. In Sonnet civ. Shakespeare
notes that the first meeting between him and his friend took place three
years before that poem was written, so that, if the words are to be taken
literally, the poet may have at times embodied reminiscences of
Southampton when he was only seventeen or eighteen. {143a} But
Shakespeare, already worn in worldly experience, passed his thirtieth
birthday in 1594, and he probably tended, when on the threshold of middle
life, to exaggerate the youthfulness of the nobleman almost ten years his
junior, who even later impressed his acquaintances by his boyish
appearance and disposition. {143b} 'Young' was the epithet invariably
applied to Southampton by all who knew anything of him even when he was
twenty-eight. In 1601 Sir Robert Ceci