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"The first heir of my invention."-This may be literally true of the Venus and Adonis, but it does not imply that the young poet had not been a diligent cultivator of fragmentary verse long before he had attempted so sustained a composition as this most original and remarkable poem. We must carry back our minds to the published poetry of 1593, when the Venus and Adonis appeared, fully to understand the originality of this production. Spenser had indeed then arisen to claim the highest rank in his own proper walk. Six books of The Fairy Queen' had been published two or three years. But, rejoicing as Shakspere must have done in The Fairy Queen,' in his own poems we cannot trace the slightest imitation of that wonderful performance; and it is especially remarkable how steadily he resists the temptation to imitate the archaismus which Spenser's popularity must have rendered fashionable. If we go back eight or ten years, and suppose, which we have fairly a right to do, that Shakspere was a writer of verse before he was twenty, the absence of any recent models upon which he could found a style will be almost as remarkable, in the case of his narrative compositions, as in that of his dramas. In William Webbe's Discourse of English Poetrie,' published in 1586, Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Skelton are the old poets whom he commends. His immediate predecessors, or contemporaries, are" Master George Gascoigne, a witty gentleman, and the very chief of our late rhymers," Surrey, Vaux, Norton, Bristow, Edwards, Tusser, Churchyard, Hunnis, Heywood, Hill, the Earl of Oxford (who "may challenge to himself the title of the most excellent" among "noble lords and gentlemen in her Majesty's court, which in the rare devices of poetry have been and yet are most excellent skilful"); Phaer, Twyne, Golding, Googe, and Fleming the translators; Whetstone, Munday. The eminence of Spenser, even before the publication of The Fairy Queen,' is thus acknowledged:"This place have I purposely reserved for one, who, if not only, yet in my judgment principally, deserveth the title of the rightest English poet that ever I read: that is, the author of The Shepherd's Calendar."" George Puttenham, whose Arte of English Poesie' was published in 1589, though probably written somewhat earlier, mentions with commendation among the later sort" For eclogue and pastoral poesy, Sir Philip Sidney and Master Challenner, and that other gentleman who wrate the late Shepherd's Calendar.' For ditty and amorous ode I find Sir Walter Raleigh's vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate. Master Edward Dyer for elegy most sweet, solemn, and of high conceit. Gascoigne for a good metre and for a plentiful vein." The expression—" that other gentleman who wrate the late Shepherd's Calendar" -would fix the date of this passage of Puttenham almost immediately subsequent to the publication of Spenser's poem in 1579, the author being still unknown. Shakspere, then, had very few examples amongst his cor.temporaries, even of the first and most obvious excellence of the Venus and Adonis-" the perfect sweetness of the versification.' To continue the thought of the same critic, this power of versification was "evidently original, and not the result of

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* Coleridge Biographia Literaria.'

an easily imitable mechanism." But, at the same time, he could not have attained the perfection displayed in the Venus and Adonis without a long and habitua practice, which could alone have bestowed the mechanical facility. It is not difficult to trace in that poem itself portions which might have been written as the desultory exercises of a young poet, and afterwards worked up so as to be imbedded in the narrative. Such is the description of the steed; such of the hare-hunt. Upon the principle upon which we have regarded the Sonnets, that they are fragmentary compositions, arbitrarily strung together, there can be no difficulty in assigning several of these, and especially those which are addressed to a mistress, to that period of the poet's life of which his own recollection would naturally suggest the second stage in his Seven Ages. "The lover sighing like furnace" would have poured himself out in juvenile conceits, such as characterize the Sonnets numbered 135, 136, 143; or in playful tokens of affection, such as the 128th, the 130th, the 145th; or in complaining stanzas," a woeful ballad," such as the 131st and 132nd. The little poems of The Passionate Pilgrim which can properly be ascribed to Shakspere have the decided character of early fragments. The beautiful elegiac stanzas of Love's Labour's Lost have the same stamp upon them; as well as similar passages in The Comedy of Errors. The noble scene of the death of Talbot and his son, forming the 5th, 6th, and 7th scenes of the 4th act of Henry VI., Part I., are so different in the structure of their versification from the other portions of the play that we may fairly regard them as forming a considerable part of some separate poem, and that perhaps not originally dramatic. "The period," says Malone, "at which Shakspeare began to write for the stage will, I fear, never be precisely ascertained."* Probably not. But in the absence of this precise information it is a far more reasonable theory that he was educating himself in dramatic as well as poetical composition generally at an early period of his life, when such a mind could not have existed without strong poetical aspirations, than the prevailing belief that the first publication of the Venus and Adonis. and his production of an original drama, were nearly contemporaneous. This theory assumes that his poetical capacity was suddenly developed, very nearly in its perfection, at the mature age of twenty-eight, in the midst of the laborious occupation of an actor, who had no claim for reward amongst his fellows but as an actor. We, on the contrary, consider that we adopt not only a more reasonable view, but one which is supported by all existing evidence, external and internal, when we regard his native fields as Shakspere's poetical school. Believing that, in the necessary leisure of a country life,-encumbered as we think with no cares of wool-stapling or glove-making, neither educating youth at the charge-house like his own Holofernes, nor even collecting his knowledge of legal terms at an attorney's desk, but a free and happy agriculturist,—the young Shakspere not exactly "lisped in numbers," but cherished and cultivated the faculty when "the numbers came;" we yield ourselves up to the poetical notion, because it is at the same time the more rational and consistent one,

Posthumous Life, p. 167.

that the genius of verse cherished her young favourite on these "willow's

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THE Avon of Warwickshire, called the Upper Avon, necessarily derives its chief interest from its associations with Shakspere. His contemporaries connected his fame with his native river :

"Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were,

To see thee in our waters yet appear,

And make those flights upon the banks of Thames

That so did take Eliza and our James !"

So wrote Jonson in his manly lines, 'To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.' After him came Davenant, with a pretty conceit that the river had lost its beauty when the great poet no longer dwelt upon its banks :

"Beware, delighted poets, when you sing,
To welcome nature in the early spring,
Your numerous feet not tread
The banks of Avon; for each flow'r,
As it ne'er knew a sun or show r,

Hangs there the pensive head.

Each tree, whose thick and spreading growth hath made
Rather a night beneath the boughs than shade,

Unwilling now to grow,

Looks like the plume a captain wears,
Whose rifled falls are steep'd i' the tears
Which from his last rage flow.

The piteous river wept itself away
Long since, alas! to such a swift decay,

That, reach the map, and look

If you a river there can spy,

And, for a river, your mock'd eye

Will find a shallow brook." *

"

Joseph Warton describes fair Fancy discovering the infant Shakspere on the winding Avon's willowed banks." Thomas Warton has painted the scenery of the Avon and its associations with a bright pencil:

"Avon, thy rural views, thy pastures wild,

The willows that o'erhang thy twilight edge,

Their boughs entangling with the embattled sedge.
Thy brink with watery foliage quaintly fringed,

Thy surface with reflected verdure tinged;
Soothe me with many a pensive pleasure mild.
But while I muse, that here the Bard Divine,
Whose sacred dust yon high-arch'd aisles enclose,
Where the tall windows rise in stately rows,
Above th' embowering shade,

Here first, at Fancy's fairy-circled shrine,
Of daisies pied his infant offering made;
Here playful yet, in stripling years unripe,
Framed of thy reeds a shrill and artless pipe
Sudden thy beauties, Avon, all are fled,
As at the waving of some magic wand;
An holy trance my charmed spirit wings,
And awful shapes of leaders and of kings,
People the busy mead,

Like spectres swarming to the wizard's hall ;
And slowly pace, and point with trembling hand
The wounds ill-cover'd by the purple pall.

Before me Pity seems to stand,

A weeping mourner, smote with anguish sore

To see Misfortune rend in frantic mood

His robe, with regal woes embroider'd o'er.

Pale Terror leads the visionary band,

And sternly shakes his sceptre, dropping blood."

The well-known lines of Gray are amongst his happiest efforts :

"Far from the sun and summer gale,

In thy green lap was Nature's Darling laid,
What time, where lucid Avon stray'd,

To him the mighty mother did unveil

Her awful face: the dauntless child

Stretch'd forth his little arms, and smiled.

This pencil take,' she said, 'whose colours clear

Richly paint the vernal year:

Thine too these golden keys, immortal boy!

This can unlock the gates of joy;

Of horror that, and thrilling fears,

Or ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears.' "'

These quotations sufficiently show that the presiding genius of the Avon is Shakspere. But even without this paramount association, the river, although little visited, abounds with picturesque scenery and interesting objects. A big, dull book has been written upon it, by one who could

* In Remembrance of Master William Shakspeare. Ode.

• Monody, written near Stratford-upon-Avon.

The Progress of Poesy.

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