pretends bears out his view, though he must have very well known that it cannot equitably be made to do so. In a note on Thorpe's dedicatory address in his 1821 edition of Malone he writes:

"The begetter is merely the person who gets or procures a thing, with the common prefix be added to it. So in Decker's Satiromastix: 'I have some cousingermans at Court shall beget you the reversion of master of the king's revels.' W. H. was probably one of the friends to whom Shakespeare's sugred Sonnets, as they are termed by Meres, had been communicated, and who furnished the printer with his copy.'

Struck with the fact that Dr. Murray has not cited the foregoing passage from Dekker, and has adduced no later example of "beget" being used as get" or gain," than one from Gower in 1393-Struck also with the fact that Mr. Sidney Lee, for whom it is a sine qua non that "begetter" should be misinterpreted, appealed to Dekker in his article on Shakespeare in the Dictionary of National Biography, but has not done so in his Life of Shakespeare, I turned to Dekker's Satiromastix, and find that the passage in question is put into the mouth of Sir Vaughan Ap Rees, a Welshman, who by way of humour is represented as murdering the English language all through the piece; I then understood why Dr. Murray did not refer to it and why Mr. Sidney Lee desisted from doing so; but I did not and do not understand how Boswell could have adduced it, unless in the hope of hoodwinking unwary readers, who he knew would accept his statement without verifying it. This single factitious example has done duty with Southamptonites and impersonalites for the last eighty years, without anyone's having been able to On reading Mr. Lee's work again I find that he has cited Dekker's Satiromastix in his appendix V (p. 405).

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cap it with another. With the metaphorical use of the word we are, of course, all familiar-the use, indeed, is metaphorical in Thorpe's preface-but the idea behind the metaphor is always that of engendering from within, not of procuring from without.

Canon Ainger, indeed, in the Athenaeum, 28th January 1899, asks leave to "cite yet one more classical example of the use of 'beget,' in the sense of 'procure,' as though there were many such instances already familiar to well-read persons. He then quotes from The Critic a passage in which Mr. Puff proposes to open his piece with the firing of a morning gun. This, Mr. Puff declares, will at once "beget an awful attention in the audience." Canon Ainger pretends to have failed to see-for I hold it more polite to suppose he is pretending that "beget " in the passage just quoted is not used" in the sense of procure, but of gender." The gun will not "procure" the required attention ab extra, and present it to the audience; it will breed the attention within them.

en

Another consideration of less weight, but one that so far as I know has not been noted, arises from the prefixing the word "only" to " begetter" in Thorpe's preface. The fact that the Sonnets are so almost exclusively conversant, directly or indirectly, about a single person, suggests that they would all be in the hands of this person, whoever he may have been. There is nothing to support the view that copies were circulated in MS. We have Meres' testimony to the fact that Shakespeare's "private friends " had seen or heard more or fewer of his "sugʼred sonnets "-doubtless the ones we have under consideration-but if copies had been going about in мs. they would have reached many another beyond the circle of Shakespeare's private friends, and Jaggard would have been

able to get hold of more than two of them for his "Passionate Pilgrim." There is no reason, then, for thinking that more than one person would have to be asked for the copy, and in this case, supposing "begetter" to mean nothing more than " procurer," the addition of the word "only" appears too emphatic for the occasion-" begetter" alone should have been ample. If on the other hand Mr. W. H. was the only cause of the Sonnets having been written at all, the fact is one of sufficient interest and importance to make record reasonable even in a preface so tersely worded as the one in question. Again the word "only," had, through the Creed, become so inseparably associated with "begotten," that I cannot imagine any one's using the words "only begetter" without intending the verb "beget " to mean metaphorically what it means in only begotten."

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Lastly I should say a few words about Mr. Chalmers's attempt to make out that Thorpe's preface is couched in extravagant language such as that of " Pistol, the ancient, and such affected persons," and hence that the word begetter" is to be taken in an unusual sense. I see Canon Ainger in his letter already referred to has endorsed this. He writes:

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"I do not suppose that even Mr. Lee would plead that the word 'begetter' was a natural word for Thorpe to have used. But the whole style of the dedication is euphuistic-the vein of Armado or Osric-and the first thought of euphuists of that calibre was never to use a common word when an uncommon one would do.”

I leave it to the reader to say whether he can find a single uncommon word, or a single word used in an uncommon sense, or a single sign of extravagance, in a preface which errs indeed deplorably on the side of conciseness, but in no other direction. Have we not

here too, as in so much else that Mr. Chalmers has written, all the criteria whereby we may detect men who are shaping, not theory by fact, but fact by theory?

Mr. Chalmers and his followers have told equitable presumption to stand aside on no other ground than that of the exigencies of their own conjectures. Having formed their conjectures on insufficient grounds, they have taken them for granted; on the ground so laid they have built other conjectures; nor is it easy to say what further folly they will not commit unless they are effectually dealt with, for men's eyes are being now focussed upon the Sonnets as they have never been focussed hitherto, and freedom from extravagance is not a virtue on which modern theorists can plume themselves.

The little that Mr. Chalmers has to say about Tyrwhitt's conjecture, approved by Malone, that " Hews," in sonnet 20, is a play on Mr. W. H.'s surname, will be found on pp. 53-63 of the Supplemental Apology. His remarks are intended to prove that sonnet 20 was addressed not to a man but to a woman-a supposition so absurd that it is not necessary to do more than refer the reader to Mr. Chalmers himself.

CHAPTER FIVE: DR. DRAKE AND THE LORD SOUTH

B

AMPTON THEORY

UT IT IS NOT MR. CHALMERS'S FATUOUSness that is so deplorable-it is the fatuousness of which he has been the cause in others, and which has vitiated more or less all that has been written about the Sonnets during the last hundred years. His two absurd books unsettled people's minds, and even though it was obvious that the Sonnets were not addressed to Queen Elizabeth, his interpretation of "begetter" opened the door for supposing them to have been addressed to some more interesting person than a plain Mr. W. H. whom nobody knew, or was likely to know. The same thing happened to the Sonnets after Mr. Chalmers's paradox, as happened to the Iliad and Odyssey after Wolf had started his multiple-authorship theory on its long and mischievous career: each successive would-be commentator must set out on a new wild-goose chase of his own. It seems as though sound criticism had something of the Prince Rupert's drop about it-once injure it and it shivers into a thousand fragments.

It was some eighteen years before Mr. Chalmers's extravagance bore its due fruit, in the form of two large quartos each containing more than 600 pages, entitled Shakspeare and his Times, by Nathan Drake, M.D. This work appeared in 1817, but its author tells us that he had been engaged upon it for several years-during which if he treated his patients with the recklessness with which he treated the Sonnets, he must have sent many a soul hurrying down to Hades.

Being about to maintain that the Sonnets were mainly addressed to Lord Southampton, he is of course compelled to adopt Mr. Chalmers's interpretation of

begetter." I find I was wrong in my letter to the Athenaeum of 24th December 1898 in saying that he had