forward as a sufficient explanation of his work. But after the proofs I have given it will hardly, I think, be denied that Shakespeare was quite capable of studying the celebrated Roman story in the original sources, and that he certainly did so in relation to Ovid's version of it.

The “Lucrece" also contains, as the critics have pointed out, evident marks of indebtedness to Virgil. The elaborate details in the pictured "Fall of Troy," which helps to beguile the sad interval before the arrival of Collatine and his friend, seem clearly derived from the second book of the "Eneid ". There is an obvious connection between the general cause or ground motive of the more famous tragedy and Lucrece's own dark fate. But by a skilful stroke the immediate agent in the ruin of cloud-kissing Ilion is associated as a kind of prototype with the destroyer of Lucrece's peace. The most prominent figure in the pictured tragedy as described by Lucrece is Sinon, and Sinon represents the same union of outward truth and inward guile, of saintly seeming and diabolical purpose, which had secured for Tarquin his fatal triumph. As Lucrece moralises on the figure, this tragic resemblance suddenly breaks upon her, arresting the soliloquy :

:

"This picture she advisedly perus'd,

And chid the painter for his wondrous skill;
Saying, some shape in Sinon's was abus'd,

So fair a form lodg'd not a mind so ill;

And still on him she gaz'd, and gazing still,

Such signs of truth in his plain face she spied,
That she concludes the picture was belied.

"It cannot be,' quoth she, 'that so much guile '—
(She would have said) 'can lurk in such a look :'
But Tarquin's shape came in her mind the while,

And from her tongue 'can lurk' from 'cannot' took;
'It cannot be' she in that sense forsook,

And turned it thus: It cannot be,' I find,
But such a face should bear a wicked mind:

"For even as subtle Sinon here is painted,
So sober-sad, so weary and so mild
(As if with grief or travail he had fainted),
To me came Tarquin armèd; so beguil'd
With outward honesty, but yet defiled

With inward vice: as Priam him did cherish,
So did I Tarquin; so my Troy did perish'."

This ominous resemblance acquires all the greater significance from the fact that Tarquin himself had recently acted the part of Sinon in relation to the besieged inhabitants of Gabii. By his crafty fraud and spotted treachery (unusual among the Romans, as Livy carefully notes) he had, in fact, brought about the ruin of their city after it had been assaulted in vain. Like Sinon, having gone to the citizens of Gabii as a suppliant outcast, with a forged tale of woe, and displaying in his person the marks of cruel usage, Tarquin had roused their sympathy, and secured a welcome which he turned to account by conspiring against his friends and benefactors, and compassing their speedy destruction. Lucrece must have been well acquainted with this sinister exploit, and it would almost inevitably recur to her mind while gazing on the innocent-looking figure of perjured Sinon. In thus weaving Virgil's narrative of the fall of Troy into Ovid's story of "Lucrece," Shakespeare utilised his early studies, and produced in his own modest words a "pamphlet " of "untutored lines," which remains a unique example of pictured sorrow.

It need hardly be said that this free use of the

materials gathered from his early reading in the Roman poets does not in the least detract from the perfect originality, to say nothing of the beauty and power, of Shakespeare's work. In a mind of such vital force the best materials are, as I have said, little more than seeds hardly to be recognised in the developed fulness of the plant and beauty of the flower. The secret of poetical life cannot, indeed, be discovered by any examination of the soil in which it grew, or of the elements by which it was nurtured. In other words, no analysis of influences and conditions, however complete, can pierce the great mystery of creative genius. By a subtle alchemy it transmutes all inferior elements into its own pure and lustrous gold. None the less it is a problem of criticism to trace as far as possible the nature and uses of these elements. This is what I have endeavoured to do with regard to one section of the manifold materials that contributed to the growth and development of Shakespeare's unrivalled genius. And though I must defer for the present the wider evidence of his Roman studies, and especially of his familiarity with Ovid, which I have collected from a careful examination of the dramas, enough perhaps has been already adduced to illustrate the main position of these papers, that Shakespeare was a fair Latin scholar, and in his earlier life a diligent student of Ovid.

Before leaving the poems, it seems almost a duty to glance for a moment at their profounder ethical and reflective aspects. Mr. Swinburne has described them as narrative, or rather semi-narrative, and semi-reflective poems, and this expresses their true character. And it may justly be said that if Shakespeare follows Ovid in the narrative and descriptive part of his work, in the

vivid picturing of sensuous passion, he is as decisively separated from him in the reflective part, the higher purpose and ethical significance of the poems. The underlying subject in both is the same, the debasing nature and destructive results of the violent sensuous impulses, which in antiquity so often usurped the name of love, although in truth they have little in common with the nobler passion. The influence of fierce inordinate desire is dealt with by Shakespeare in these poems in all its breadth as affecting both sexes, and in all its intensity as blasting the most sacred interests and relationships of life. In working out the subject, Shakespeare shows his thorough knowledge of its seductive outward charm, of the arts and artifices, the persuasions and assaults, the raptures and languors of stimulated sensual passion. In this he is quite a match for the erotic and elegiac poets of classic times, and especially of Roman literature. He is not likely therefore in any way to undervalue the attraction or the power of what they celebrate in strains so fervid and rapturous. But, while contemplating the lower passion steadily in all its force and charm, he has at the same time the higher vision which enables him to see through and beyond it, the reflective insight to measure its results, and to estimate with remorseless accuracy its true worth. It is in this higher power of reflective insight, in depth and vigour of thought as well as feeling, that Shakespeare's earliest efforts are marked off even from the better works of those whom he took, if not as his masters, at least as his models and guides. He was himself full of rich and vigorous life, deepened by sensibilities of the rarest strength and delicacy; and in early youth had realised, in his own experience, the impetuous

force of passionate impulses. But his intellectual power no less than the essential depth and purity of his nobler emotional nature would effectually prevent his ever becoming "soft fancy's slave". A temporary access of passion would but rouse to fresh activity the large discourse looking before and after with which he was pre-eminently endowed. As such passionate moods subsided, he would meditate profoundly on the working and ultimate issues of these fierce explosive elements, if unrestrained by the higher influences of intellectual and moral life. A spirit so richly gifted, capable of soaring with unwearied wing into the highest heaven of thought and emotion, must have early felt not only that violent delights have violent ends, but that voluntary selfabandonment to the blind and imperious calls of appetite and passion is the most awful form of moral and social suicide.

These searching youthful experiences seem to have determined, almost unconsciously perhaps, Shakespeare's earliest choice of subjects. In any case, the brilliant deification of lawless passion in the "Venus and Adonis," but emphasises the social ruin produced by the destruction of female purity and truth it exemplifies. In the "Lucrece," the wider effects of unbridled lust are shown in the sacrifice of a noble life, the desolation of a faithful and united household, and the dethronement of a kingly dynasty. In working out the latter subject, Shakespeare has, as we have seen, skilfully interwoven, with the ruin of Tarquin's house, the destruction of Priam and his realm from similar This theme he recurred to again at a later period, in the wonderful and perplexing drama of "Troilus and Cressida," one main purpose of which

causes.