A Lover's Complaint was first published in 1609, at the end of the Sonnets. There is no evidence by which to determine the date of its composition; I scarcely think, however, that it can have come very early, the style of the poem being, to my mind, much more difficult and involved than that of Venus and Adonis or Lucrece. Indeed, the sense at times is really obscure, perhaps, though, through corruption of the text; lines 240-242, for instance, can hardly have come down to us just as Shakespeare wrote them. The merits of the poem speak for themselves. It is a beautiful piece of narrative verse which makes us wish once more that Shakespeare had given the world a larger body of such poetry, instead, say, of wrestling into shape the formless chaos of Henry VI. parts i. ii. and iii. Andronicus, too, with its midsummer madness of bloodthirsty melodrama, could have been spared, if a second Lover's Complaint had been the substitute. Very noticeable in the present poem is the effortless ease of the narra

Titus

tive. The poet's muse does not soar to the empyrean, essaying "things unattempted yet." She wings the middle air with a sustained flight that never falters. It is the same great faculty of telling a story that makes Venus and Adonis and Lucrece such perfect specimens of the narrator's act. Beautiful, too, is the elaboration and preciousness (almost) of the style in the purely descriptive passages, as where the deserted Ariadne describes the faithless Theseus; while throughout the poem, under the fanciful language, beats just a sufficiency of passion and emotion. Among the old commentators none speaks with more sympathy of A Lover's Complaint than Malone; and he makes, I think, rather a happy criticism when says that the poem reads like a challenge to Spenser on his own ground. A Lover's Complaint has a distinctly Spenserian flavour; it has much of Spenser's stately pathos, and sense of physical beauty, and exquisite verbal melody; and, Spenserian or not, it is wholly charming.

he

Or monarch's hands that let not bounty fall
Where want cries some, but where excess begs all.
Of folded schedules had she many a one,
Which she perus'd, sigh'd, tore, and gave the flood;
Crack'd many a ring of posied gold and bone,
Bidding them find their sepulchres in mud;
Found yet more letters sadly penn'd in blood,
With sleided silk feat and affectedly
Enswath'd, and seal'd to curious secrecy.
These often bath'd she in her fluxive eyes,
And often kiss'd, and often gan to tear;
Cried, "O false blood, thou register of lies,
What unapproved witness dost thou bear!

50

A reverend man that graz'd his cattle nigh-
Sometime a blusterer, that the ruffle knew
Of court, of city, and had let go by
The swiftest hours, observed as they flew-
Towards this afflicted fancy fastly drew,
And, privileg'd by age, desires to know
In brief the grounds and motives of her woe.
So slides he down upon his grained bat,
And comely-distant sits he by her side;
When he again desires her, being sat,
Her grievance with his hearing to divide:
If that from him there may be aught applied
Which may her suffering ecstasy assuage,
'Tis promis'd in the charity of age.

"Father," she says, "though in me you behold The injury of many a blasting hour,

Let it not tell your judgment I am old;
Not age, but sorrow, over me hath power:

6 Ruffle, noise, brawls.

60

70