"Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed
That every word doth almost tell my name
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
O know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument."

This brooding and inward looking is a common habit.10 Chatterton, Kirk White, and Dermody, have dissected their very hearts. Byron lives in his vagrant "Childe," and bating some most disgusting affectation in his Corsair—Lara—Giaour. Shelley groans with his Prometheus—breathes in his Laon—and draws his own image with the life of his Helen.11 This may have been the case with Shakspeare. Giving free scope to his heart's inmost workings, he has given posterity, in his sonnets, a record of feeling so expressed as to render it easy to build upon it a fabric of fact—a true and accurate 'life.'

10 Bulwer says in the Disowned, that his effort is, at all times to "avoid a self-picture in his writings." The very fact that an effort must be made, proves the existence of this yearning egotism. In writings never intended for the world's eye there is no drawback to the inclination, and it is followed. Shakspeare's sonnets were not "writ for the world."

11 This self-identity is not so visible in the tragedies of Byron and Shelley, for the simple reason, perhaps, that these are more the works of art—more the creatures of the brain than heart—abound more in skill than feeling.

His sonnets, as they now stand, are hardly intelligible, but when placed in proper order, tell one unbroken story. We learn, inter alia that Shakspeare had a male friend whom he loved most dearly: that this friend "broke a two-fold truth"—and the question is, in what manner. Searching farther we gain the clew, and find that the poet had imbodied his vision of poetic loveliness—his Iris en air—in one, whom in the midst of his dream of purity and beauty unearthly, he found "as black as hell and as dark as night." That friend wins her to his arms, and this is where he is "led to riot" and to break a "two-fold truth." The poet finally discovers her wretched nature and asks—

"Why should my heart think that a several plot
Which my heart knows the wide world's common place?"

Then pauses in the midst of the deeply affecting portraiture of self-feeling, to whisper the exquisite self-excuse: "How could

Love's eye be true
That is so vexed with watching and with tears."

Perhaps self-portraiture might be even detected in his plays. Goethe's comprehension of the incomprehensible Hamlet, (viz. That with a great and philosophic mind he was too shrinking and sensitive for the execution of his high resolves—in a word, that like a porcelain jar attempting to enfold the roots of an oak, until shattered in the attempt, his shrinking nature tottered under the pressure of a purpose too mighty,) may have been a picture of Shakspeare's self: violent ambition acting upon the poet's fine nature, as other passions did upon that of Hamlet.

I have occupied so much space with that part of Shakspeare's history little known, that it has given me an excuse for shunning the beaten track altogether. I will however quote Dryden's eulogy, as it is short and famous for its pith.12