No, I am that I am, and they that level I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel; All men are bad, and in their badness reign. He thinks it preferable to be really guilty of the plagiarisms with which he has been charged, than, being not guilty, to suffer the reproach, as in the latter case, knowing his own merit, he is deprived of the public appreciation, and suffers unjustly. Why should other writers, who are more guilty than he of using the writings of others to dress up their wit, be his accusers? Why should those who have made licentiousness the subject of their dramas charge him with it, and denounce as wicked what he thinks good? IIe obeys his own taste in his works, and asks no favors of those around him. They only publish their own guilt in the effort to blacken him. For aught they know, he may be right and they wrong. Neither the truth nor falsity of his writings must he tried by what they may ignorantly say of them, unless they assume ignorance and pretension to be proper standards of judgment for all men to adopt. SONNET 122. Thy gift, Thy tables, are within My brain Which shall above that idle rank remain Beyond all date, even to eternity; Or at the least, so long as brain and heart His power as a writer and all the resources he has employed are born of himself. They can never be lost to him, and are equally inaccessible to his ignorant accusers. They will endure forever, or at least as long as brain and heart subsist. Until these are destroyed they will remain. His manuscripts could not contain them, and as he needed nothing to remind him of them, he had destroyed all records, trusting to the table of his memory which had received them in their full development. It would be a reproach to his memory to keep any mementos of the work which he held in such loving veneration. It may be fairly inferred from the two preceding stanzas, that the plays which appeared in Shakespeare's name had aroused the envy of contemporaneous writers. They sought to depreciate them in the public estimation by charging the author with plagiarism. He replies by accusing them with an aggravated use of the same means, and the additional charge of igno rance, which disqualifies them from judging him correctly. But lest their charges should at some time be substantiated by his papers and memoranda, he destroys them all, trusting to his memory, and claims his works as the product of his own brain. SONNET 123. No, Time, Thou shalt not boast that I do change: Than think that we before have heard them told. Not wondering at the present nor the past, I will be true, despite Thy scythe and Thee. In this stanza he apologizes for, or rather excuses, any use he may have made of the works of former writers in the construction of his own. Time can know no change in him, as there is nothing new in the past. No description of the pyramids, however animated or glowing, could make them appear novel or strange to him. It would be but a new description of what he had known before. Our lives are short, and rather than spend them in search of new wonders, we admire the old ones, and each observer, led by his own tastes, finds new beauties in them that he has never heard mentioned by others. He would not trust to the records that all ages have furnished of things in the past or present, for his own opinon of them; because they depend upon the accounts which, being formed from both careful and careless examination, are necessarily untrue. But in his writings, also founded upon events and stories of past ages, he will write truly, despite all the changes of time. Such truth as they afford in the illustration of truth, philosophy, poetry, character, and life, he will use, without regard to the skeleton which the past has furnished to be decorated by them. In this respect his dramas differ from those of his contemporaries, who are satisfied to use the stories and events of the past, as of themselves sufficient for their work. SONNET 124. If My dear love were but the child of state, It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls Under the blow of thralled discontent, Whereto the inviting time our fashion calls: It fears not policy, that heretic, Which works on leases of short-number'd hours, But all alone stands hugely politic, That it nor grows with heat nor drowns with showers. To this I witness call the fools of time, Which die for goodness, who have liv'd for crime. In this stanza he contrasts the permanency of his writings with the character he has drawn of Posthumus in the play of "Cymbeline," which he was probably composing at the time. Posthumus was the adopted child of Cymbeline, and was subject to such fortune as Time held in store for him, whether good or bad,-a weed among weeds, or a flower among flowers. So his play, if it were similarly exposed, would suffer from similar causes. But this was not its fortune. Unlike Posthumus, it was unaffected by accident, owed nothing to the pomp and glitter of the court, and free of obligation, suffered nothing from the unkindness of majesty as Posthumus did. It suffered from no policy that, as in the case of Posthumus, limited his stay at court at the risk of his life. But it was a creation of itself, defiant of all the elements of court life and power. Those courtiers who spent their lives in dancing attendance upon majesty, and were finally rewarded with frowns, disappointments, and often death itself, would do well to profit by such an example. (See note "Francis Bacon," for further interpretation.) SONNET 125. Were 't aught to me I bore the canopy, Which prove more short than waste or ruining? Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour Lose all, and more, by paying too much rent, |