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compliment—‘gross painting’ Shakespeare calls it—was more conspicuous in the intercourse of patron and client during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign than in any other epoch. For this result the sovereign herself was in part responsible. Contemporary schemes of literary compliment seemed infected by the feigned accents of amorous passion and false rhapsodies on her physical beauty with which men of letters servilely sought to satisfy the old Queen’s incurable greed of flattery. Sir Philip Sidney described with admirable point the adulatory excesses to which less exalted patrons were habituated by literary dependents. He gave the warning that as soon as a man showed interest in poetry or its producers, poets straightway pronounced him ‘to be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all.’ ‘You shall dwell upon superlatives . . . Your soule shall be placed with Dante’s Beatrice.’ The warmth of colouring which distinguishes many of the sonnets that Shakespeare, under the guise of disinterested friendship, addressed to the youth can be matched at nearly all points in the adulation that patrons were in the habit of receiving from literary dependents in the style that Sidney described.

Patrons habitually addressed in affectionate terms.

Shakespeare assured his friend that he could never grow old (civ.), that the finest types of beauty and chivalry in mediæval romance lived again in him (cvi.), that absence from him was misery, and that his affection for him was unalterable. Hundreds of poets openly gave the like assurances to their patrons. Southampton was only one of a crowd of Mæcenases whose panegyrists, writing without concealment in their own names, credited them with every perfection of mind and body, and ‘placed them,’ in Sidney’s apt phrase, ‘with Dante’s “Beatrice.”’

Illustrations of the practice abound. Matthew Roydon wrote of his patron, Sir Philip Sidney:

His personage seemed most divine,

A thousand graces one might count

Upon his lovely cheerful eyne.

To heare him speak and sweetly smile

You were in Paradise the while.

Edmund Spenser in a fine sonnet told his patron, Admiral Lord Charles Howard, that ‘his good personage and noble deeds’ made him the pattern to the present age of the old heroes of whom ‘the antique poets’ were ‘wont so much to sing.’ This compliment, which Shakespeare turns to splendid account in Sonnet cvi., recurs constantly in contemporary sonnets of adulation. Ben Jonson apostrophised the Earl of Desmond as ‘my best-best lov’d.’ Campion told Lord Walden, the Earl of Suffolk’s undistinguished heir, that although his muse sought to express his love, ‘the admired virtues’ of the patron’s youth

Bred such despairing to his daunted Muse

That it could scarcely utter naked truth.

Dr. John Donne includes among his ‘Verse Letters’ to patrons and patronesses several sonnets of similar temper, one of which, acknowledging a letter of news from a patron abroad, concludes thus:

And now thy alms is given, thy letter’s read,

The body risen again, the which was dead,

And thy poor starveling bountifully fed.

After this banquet my soul doth say grace,

And praise thee for it and zealously embrace

Thy love, though I think thy love in this case

To be as gluttons’, which say ‘midst their meat

They love that best of which they most do eat.

The tone of yearning for a man’s affection is sounded by Donne and Campion almost as plaintively in their sonnets to patrons as it was sounded by Shakespeare. There is nothing, therefore, in the vocabulary of affection which Shakespeare employed in his sonnets of friendship to conflict with the theory that they were inscribed to a literary patron with whom his intimacy was of the kind normally subsisting at the time between literary clients and their patrons.

Direct references to Southampton in the sonnets of friendship.

We know Shakespeare had only one literary patron, the Earl of Southampton, and the view that that nobleman is the hero of the sonnets of ‘friendship’ is strongly corroborated by such definite details as can be deduced from the vague eulogies in