Shakespeare is superiour. But he is more incorrect, indigested, and redundant: and if Spenser has too much learning, Shakespeare has too much conceit. It may be necessary however to read the first one hundred & twenty six sonnets of our divine dramatist as written by a lady:[22] for they are addressed with great fervency yet delicacy of passion, and with more of fondness than friendship, to a beautiful youth.[23] Only twenty six, the last bearing but a small proportion to the whole number, and too manifestly of a subordinate cast, have a female for their object. But under the palliative I have suggested, many descriptions or illustrations of juvenile beauty, pathetic endearments, and sentimental declarations of hope or disappointment, which occur in the former part of this collection, will lose their impropriety and give pleasure without disgust. The following, a few lines omitted, is unperplexed and elegant.

In the next, he pursues the same argument in the same strain.

Here are strong marks of Shakespeare's hand and manner. In the next, he continues his play with the flowers. He chides the forward violet, a sweet thief, for stealing the fragrance of the boy's breath, and for having died his veins with too rich a purple. The lilly is condemned for presuming to emulate the whiteness of his hand, and buds of marjoram for stealing the ringlets of his hair. Our lover is then seduced into some violent fictions of the same kind; and after much ingenious absurdity concludes more rationally,

Shakespeare's Sonnets were published in the year 1599.[29] I remember to have seen this edition, I think with Venus and Adonis and the rape of Lucrece, a very small book, in the possession of the late Mr Thomson of Queen's College Oxford, a very curious and intelligent collector of this kind of literature.[30] But they were circulated in manuscript before the year 1598. For in that year, they are mentioned by Meres. "Witness his [Shakespeare's] Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends, &c."[31] They were reprinted in the year 1609; one hundred & fifty four in number. They were first printed under Shakespeares name, among his Poems, in the year 1717, by Sewel, who had no other authority than tradition.[32] But that they were undoubtedly written by Shakespeare, the frequent intermixture of thoughts and expressions which now appear in his plays, and, what is more, the general complexion of their phraseology & sentiment, abundantly demonstrate, Shakespeare cannot be concealed. Their late ingenious editor is of opinion, that Daniel was Shakespeare's model.[33]

I have before incidentally mentioned Barnefield's Sonnets,[34] which, like Shakespeare's, are adressed [sic] to a boy. They are flowery and easy. Meres recites Barnefelde among the pastoral writers.[35] These sonnets, twenty in number, are written in the character of a shepherd: and there are other pieces by Barnefield which have a pastoral turn, in Englands Helicon. Sir Philip Sydney had made every thing Arcadian. I will cite four of this authors best