[86] Shakespeare writes in his Sonnets:
My glass shall not persuade me I am old (xxii. 1.).
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity (lxii. 9-10).
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang (lxxiii. 1-2).
My days are past the best (cxxxviii. 6).
Daniel in Delia (xxiii.) in 1591, when twenty-nine years old, exclaimed:
My years draw on my everlasting night,
. . . My days are done.
Richard Barnfield, at the age of twenty, bade the boy Ganymede, to whom he addressed his Affectionate Shepherd and a sequence of sonnets in 1594 (ed. Arber, p. 23):
Behold my gray head, full of silver hairs,
My wrinkled skin, deep furrows in my face.
Similarly Drayton in a sonnet (Idea, xiv.) published in 1594, when he was barely thirty-one, wrote:
Looking into the glass of my youth’s miseries,
I see the ugly face of my deformed cares
With withered brows all wrinkled with despairs;
and a little later (No. xliii. of the 1599 edition) he repeated how
Age rules my lines with wrinkles in my face.