"Let this sad interim like the ocean be Which parts the shores, where _two contracted new_ Come daily to the banks"-- we may confidently assign to the year 1598 the first contract of amity between the poet and his friend. However, all this is by no means conclusive. Shakespeare may have known Horace from other sources than Meres, and the quotation from Ovid, together with the expressions used by Meres, he certainly had encountered in Golding's translation of the _Metamorphoses_, with which he was familiar. The historical allusions in Sonnets c.-cxxvi., which form a continuous poem, are not, indeed, by any means clear or easy to interpret; but Sonnet civ. dates the whole group definitely enough, in the statement that three years have elapsed since the first meeting of the friends:-- "Three winters cold Have from the forests shook three summers' pride; Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd In process of the seasons have I seen; Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd, Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green." Thus we must assign this important group to the year 1601; and this being so, it must also appear probable that the line-- "The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured "-- alludes to the fact that Elizabeth (for whom, in the mode of the day, the moon was the accepted symbol) had come unharmed through the dangers of Essex's rebellion--the more so as the beautiful lines-- "Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh "-- show that the poem was written in the spring. It would be unreasonable to infer from this allusion any ill-will on the poet's part towards Essex and his comrades. Still less can we follow Tyler, when, by the aid of a complex scaffolding of hypotheses built up, in German rather than in English fashion, around Sonnets cxxiv. and cxxv., he laboriously works up to the air-drawn conjecture that Shakespeare is here expressing himself offensively towards his former patron Southampton, now a prisoner in the Tower, and even that Southampton is aimed at in the line about those "who have lived for crime." Equally baseless, of course, is the corollary which would find in Sonnet cxxv. Shakespeare's defence against an accusation of faithlessness towards the man to whom he had written, seven years earlier, in the dedication of _Lucrece_, "The love I dedicate Your Lordship is without end." Nor It is absurd to construct a whole repulsive and fantastic romance on the basis of a single obscure phrase. Turning now from the poems to the person to whom they are believed to have been addressed, this is what we learn of him:--