Taking these seventeen Sonnets together, reading and re-reading them, can we suppose that they were composed by the great delineator, of or toward a person under or much below thirty? They imply that the person addressed was not so far below middle life that a statement of the decadence that would come after his fortieth year presented a remote or far-off picture. Besides, if his friend was below thirty years, while it might be well to urge him to marry, hardly would the poet have used language implying that his marrying days were waning. To put it roughly, there would not be so much of the now-or-never thought running through the ornate verse in which the poet voices his appeal. As we read these seventeen Sonnets, we may perhaps suspect that the desire that his friend shall marry is so strongly stated and presented, because it is a theme around which the poet can appropriately weave so much of compliment and expressions of admiration and affection. But if that be so, must we not still believe that the great dramatist could not have addressed them to his friend, unless in substance and in all their more delicate shades of meaning and of coloring they were appropriate to him? We may now pass from this first group to other Sonnets which convey similar and, I submit, unmistakable intimations as to the age of the poet's friend or patron. Sonnet C., especially when read with the one preceding, clearly indicates that it was written as a greeting or salutation after absence, and on the poet's return to his friend. In it he says: Rise, resty Muse, my love's sweet face survey, _If Time have any wrinkle graven there; If any, be a satire to decay_, And make _Time's spoils_ despised everywhere. Give my love fame faster _than Time wastes life_; So thou prevent'st his scythe and crooked knife. Closely following, in Sonnet CIV., the poet says: To me, fair friend, _you never can be old_, For as you were when first your eye I eyed, Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold,[10] * * * * * In process of the seasons have I seen, * * * * * Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green. Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand, Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived; So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand, Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived[11]: For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred; Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead.