There are poems, too, that he writes early in this town life of his, dedicated to that Earl of Southampton[16] of whom I have already spoken, and into whose good graces he has somehow fallen. But the Earl is eight or ten years his junior, a mere boy in fact, just from Cambridge, strangely attracted by this high-browed, blue-eyed, sandy-haired young fellow from Stratford, who has shown such keenness and wondrous insight. Would you hear a little bit of what he wrote in what he calls the “first heir of my invention?” It is wonderfully descriptive of a poor hare who is hunted by hounds; which he had surely seen over and again on the Oxfordshire or Cotswold downs: “Sometimes he runs among a flock of sheep, To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell, And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer; Danger deviseth shifts; wit waits on fear. “For there, his smell, with others being mingled, The hot-scent snuffing hounds are driven to doubt, Ceasing their clamorous cry, till they have singled With much ado, the cold fault clearly out; Then do they spend their mouths: Echo replies As if another chase were in the skies. “By this poor Wat, far off upon a hill, Stands on his hinder legs with listening fear, To hearken if his foes pursue him still; Anon, their loud alarums he doth hear; And now his grief may be comparéd well To one sore-sick, that hears the passing bell.” It must have been close upon this that his first play was written and played, though not published until some years after. It may have been “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” it may have been the “Two Gentlemen of Verona;” no matter what: I shall not enter into the question of probable succession of his plays, as to which critics will very likely be never wholly agreed.[17] It is enough that he wrote them; the merry ones when his heart was light, and the tragic ones when grief lay heavily upon him. And yet this is only partially true; he had such amazing power of subordinating his feeling to his thought. I wonder how much of his own hopes and possible foretaste he did put into the opening lines of what, by most perhaps, is reckoned his first play:-- “Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives, Live registered upon our brazen tombs, And then grace us in the disgrace of Death; When, spite of cormorant-devouring Time, The endeavor of this present breath may buy That honor, which shall bate his scythe’s keen edge And make us heirs of all Eternity!” _Work and Reputation._ And what was thought of him in those first days? Not overmuch; none looked upon him as largely overtopping his compeers of that day. His _Venus and Adonis_[18] was widely and admiringly known: so was his _Lucrece_; but Marlowe’s “sound and fury” in “Tamburlaine” would have very possibly drawn twice the house of “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”