O fairest flow'r no sooner blown but blasted,

Soft silken primrose fading timelessly,
Summer's chief honour, if thou hadst outlasted
Bleak Winter's force that made thy blossom dry;
For he being amorous on that lovely dye

That did thy cheek envermeil, thought to kiss
But kill'd alas, and then bewail'd his fatal bliss.

85. Lines 1127, 1128:

She lifts the coffer-lids that close his eyes, Where, lo, two LAMPS, BURNT OUT, in darkness lies. So Lucrece, 1378, 1379:

And dying eyes gleam'd forth their ashy lights,

Like dying coals burnt out in tedious nights.

86. Line 1142: Bud and be blasted in a BREATHINGWHILE. So Richard III. i. 3. 60:

Cannot be quiet scarce a breathing-while.

87. Lines 1167, 1168:

And in his blood, that on the ground lay spill'd,
A purple flower sprung up.

In England's Helicon, published in 1600, there is a charming poem by Henry Constable, entitled The Shepherd's Song of Venus and Adonis; the last lines are:

Deadly wound his death did bring.

Which when Venus found,

She fell in a swound,

And, awaked, her hands did wring.

Nymphs and satyrs skipping,
Came together tripping,

Echo every cry express'd;
Venus by her power

Turn'd him to a flower,

Which she weareth in her crest.
Finis.

The whole poem, which is given in Bullen's reprint, 1887, deserves notice. Of course the flower in question was the anemone, derived from the Greek vues; as Ovid says, præstant nomina Venti (Metamorphoses, bk. x. 739).

88. Line 1190: And yokes her silver DOVES, &c. -For the classical reference compare The Tempest, iv. 1. 92-94: I met her deity (ie. Venus)

Cutting the clouds towards Paphos and her son
Dove-drawn with her.

Mr. Bullen prints (p. 108) a charming stanza in his Elizabethan Lyrics (1887) from John Wilbye's Second Set of Madrigals, 1609:

So light is love, in matchless beauty shining,
When he revisits Cypris' hallowed bowers,
Two feeble doves, harness'd in silken twining,

Can draw his chariot midst the Paphian flowers:
Lightness in love! how ill it fitteth!

So heavy on my heart he sitteth.

89. Line 1194: Means to IMMURE.-See Troilus and Cressida, note 3.

364

མཉེས བ། བ༑ སོག ལྟར།། མཉན ་་་་---t་--,-M་

Lucrece was entered on the Stationers' Register in 1594 as follows: "9 maij: Master harrison Senior: Entred for his copie vnder th[e hand of master Senior Cawood, Warden, a booke entituled the Ravyshement of Lucrece. vj. C."

The poem was printed in the same year, with this title: "LVCRECE. | LONDON. | Printed by Richard Field, for John Harrison, and are to be sold at the signe of the White Grey-hound in Paules Churh-yard. 1594 |. Dr. Furnivall remarks-Leopold Shakspere, Introduction, p. xxxv.-that "this first edition was probably seen through the press by Shakspere himself." Apparently, however, copies of the edition differ in some important points of reading; see Cambridge Shakespeare, vol. ix. p. xiv. Lucrece was reprinted in 1598 in octavo, and the Cambridge editors mention four other important editions, in 1600, 1607, 1616, and 1624. The edition of 1616 purported to be "newly revised;" but the words were evidently a publisher's trick to attract purchasers. It is clear, I think, from the comparatively limited number of impressions through which Lucrece passed, that the poem was never so popular as its forerunner, Venus and Adonis. Like the earlier book, Lucrece is dedicated to the Earl of Southampton; and we can scarcely be wrong in assuming it to be the "graver labour" of which the poet had previously spoken. The story of Lucrece had been told by various writers; among classical authors, by Livy in the first book of his history, chapters 57 and 58, and by Ovid in the second book of the Fasti; in English, by Chaucer-Legende of Good Women; by Lydgate-Falles of Princes, book iii.; and in Painter's Palace of Pleasure, 1567.

Ballad-writers, too, had dealt with the subject. In Arber's Transcript of the Stationers' Register are two interesting entries. The first, under date of the year 1568, mentions "a ballett,

the grevious complaynt of Lucrece;" the second notes that 4d. had been received from "James Robertes, for his lycense for the pryntinge of a ballett entituled The Death of Lucryssia." See Arber's Transcript, vol. i. pp. 379 and 416. Now with some of this literature Shakespeare must have been acquainted: the only question is, on which of the authors above mentioned did he draw most considerably? Myself, after reading Professor Baynes' elaborate treatment of the subject, I cannot doubt but that Ovid's Fasti was the source to which Shakespeare owed most. Parallelisms in literature, like facts and figures in ordinary life, are desperately misleading and unsatisfactory things: to this critic they mean so much; to that, nothing. Hence it is scarcely ever possible to give direct and positive proof that one author has borrowed from another. I forbear, therefore, to make any dogmatic statements on the matter: I will merely remark that a comparison of the two poems leads me to think, with Professor Baynes, that the Elizabethan poet had read—and read closely-the work of his classical forerunner. To grant this is not, of course, to detract in any way from the splendid merits of the poem.

A word as to the metre. "The versification," says Professor Dowden, "is freer and bolder; in the Venus and Adonis the stanza was one of six lines, consisting of a rhymed quatrain, followed by a couplet; here a fifth line is introduced between the quatrain and couplet, rhyming with lines two and four. This structure tends to encourage more variety in the arrangement of pauses, and may, perhaps, in some degree, explain the fact that runon lines are much more frequent in the Lucrece than in the Venus and Adonis. The proportion of the run-on lines in the Lucrece is 1 in 1081, in Venus and Adonis 1 in 25 40." See Furnivall's Introduction to the Leopold Shakspere, p. xxxiii.