The key to the Sonnets will be found in No. 62. The language in which it is written is explicit and capable of being understood by any ordinary intellect.
"Sinne of selfe-love possesseth al mine eie
And all my soule, and al my every part;
And for this sinne there is no remedie,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Me thinkes no face so gratious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account,
And for my selfe mine owne worth do define,
As I all other in all worth's surmount
But when my glasse shewes me my selfe indeed
Beated and chopt with tand antiquitie,
Mine own selfe love quite contrary I read
Selfe, so selfe loving were iniquity.
Tis thee (my-selfe) that for myself I praise
Painting my age with beauty of thy daies."
The writer here states definitely that he is dominated by the sin of self-love; it possesseth his eye, his soul, and every part of him. There can be found no remedy for it; it is so grounded in his heart. No face is so gracious as is his, no shape so true, no truth of such account. He defines his worth as surmounting that of all others. This is the frank expression of a man who not only believed that he was, but knew that he was superior to all his contemporaries, not only in intellectual power, but in personal appearance. Then comes an arrest in the thought, and he realises that time has been at work. He has been picturing himself as he was when a young man. He turns to his glass and sees himself beated and chopt with tanned antiquity; forty summers have passed over his brow.[48]
Francis Bacon at forty years of age, or thereabouts, unmarried, childless, sits down to his table, Hilliard's portrait before him, with pen in hand, full of self-love, full of admiration for that beautiful youth on whose counterfeit presentment he is gazing. His intellectual triumphs pass in review before him, most of them known only to himself and that youth—his companion through life. That was the Francis Bacon who controlled him in all his comings and goings—his ideal whom he worshipped. If he could have a son like that boy! His pen begins to move on the paper—
"From fairest creatures we desire increase
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decrease
His tender heire might bear his memory."
The pen stops and the writer's eye wanders to the miniature:—
"But thou[49] contracted to thine own bright eyes."
And so the Sonnets flow on, without effort, without the need of reference to authorities, for the great, fixed and methodical memory needs none.
How natural are the allusions—
"Thou art thy mother's glasse and she in thee
Calls backe the lovely Aprill of her prime."