mum, the other copies woman. Collier substituted nun, and the same correction is found, so the Cambridge editors say (vol. ix. p. 432), in MS. in Capell's copy of Q. 1. Twine writes: "his long lamented wife lady Lucina remained in vertuous life and holy contemplation among the religious Nunnes" (p. 318). The direction at the beginning of this scene-which was introduced by Malonedescribes Thaisa as high-priestess; but it is doubtful if Shakespeare intended this. All that Wilkins says is: "In this Temple was she placed to be a Nunne” (p. 77). Gower, however, calls her the abbess.

307. Lines 35, 36:

That Thaisa am I, supposed dead

And DROWN'D.

We may regard the scansion of the first four words as two trochaic feet followed by an iambus, or we may take That as a monosyllabic foot (compare Twelfth Night, note 77) with an iambus following, and then an anapæst. Drown'd means overwhelmed, sunk and lost.

308. Lines 69, 70:

Pure Dian, bless thee for thy vision! I
Will offer NIGHT-OBLATIONS to thee.

So Ff. and Dyce. Qq. read and for I. What night-oblations may be, no one has satisfactorily explained.

309. Lines 73, 74:

This ORNAMENT,

Makes me look dismal, will I clip to form.

See iii. 3. 27-30. Malone cites Much Ado about Nothing, iii. 2. 45, 46: "the old ornament of his cheek hath already stuff'd tennis-balls." In the present connection the word ornament seems out of place. Perhaps we ought to read excrement, as in Love's Labour's Lost, v. 1. 110; see note 159 on that play. The absence of the relative pronoun before makes probably shows that the passage, as it now stands, has lost some words which once belonged to it.

310. Line 89: Virtue PRESERV'D from fell destruction's blast. So Malone. Qq., F. 3, F. 4 read preferd or preferred.

311. Lines 95-97:

when fame

Had spread their cursed deed, AND honour'd name
Of Pericles, to rage the CITY turn.

So Malone and Dyce, following F. 3. Qq. read the for and.
City, used collectively for the citizens, is treated as plural.

312. Line 99: To punish THEM,—although not done, but meant.—Malone inserted them, which is required both by rhythm and sense.

It is natural to criticise Venus and Adonis and Lucrece together. The poems have much in common, with much that brings them into very direct and striking contrast. Each is obviously the work of a young poet: from merely reading through the poems, without the aid of external testimony, we could with very considerable certainty assign to them an early date in the long list of Shakespeare's works. They have all the characteristic qualities of youthful work-careless ease and vigour of style, over-laden elaboration of colour and artistic effect, over-accentuated treatment of somewhat sensuous scenes. Venus and Adonis and Lucrece are connected by their theme. That theme is not a particularly pleasant one. It is love, or rather lust: the poet throws all his power of workmanship into representing the keenness and invincibility of a sensual passion that knows no restraint of moral instinct or conventional decorum. But, whereas Lucrece is intensely didactic, Venus and Adonis is no less intensely non-moral; not immoral, but unmoral. If Lucrece gives us the "criticism of life" theory of literature at its keenest, Venus and Adonis shows us the "art for art's sake" doctrine in the furthest possible development of that idea.

Venus and Adonis is the purest paganism, a deification of erotic impulse which Catullus himself could not have surpassed. The lovely goddess, exquisite as when she rose from the foam-blossoms of the blue Ægean, typifies lust, and, alas! lust does not shock us, simply because it comes in the form of such perfect beauty. Critics have compared Venus and Adonis with the masterpiece of Shakespeare's "dead shepherd," with the Hero and Leander, which Keats alone among English poets could have fitly continued. And the criticism is quite

just. Nothing in either poem is more remarkable than the insistence on physical beauty. Marlowe dwells on the mere forms of his two lovers, on symmetry and shapeliness of limb, on fascination of colour, with all the loving, sensuous, deliberate content of a sculptor. And so it is with Shakespeare. He brings but two characters on the scene of passion, and he lavishes on them every possible touch that can please the eye and intoxicate the on-looker with the wonder and glory of physical grace. And in this intoxication we cease to be moralists: our moral sense is drugged by the poppied draught of sensuous, seductive poison. The hungry goddess is like Browning's "Pretty Woman." She is fair, divinely fair, a daughter of the gods, and we say of the sweet faceBe its beauty Its sole duty.

There can be no place for the preacher here: we cannot take very seriously the morality that flows from the pretty, protesting lips of the blushing boy. Mr. Swinburne describes Venus and Adonis and Lucrece as seminarrative, semi-reflective verse. The description, I think, is more appropriate to the longer and later poem. Venus and Adonis is simply narrative, and a narrative that carries us along on a wave of passion which moves far too quickly to admit of much reflection. It is, as far as I can understand it, a study in sensuous effects; a series of stanzas in which morality and the ethical element that we usually look for in literature, especially English literature, are wholly absent; a poem which we cannot call immoral because the whole idea is so fantastic and unreal, so removed from the world of the practical and possible; a poem of which we can only say, that it is wholly and intentionally un-moral. We read it, just as,