livre i

.), where he declares that his mistress's name

Victorieux des peuples et des rois S'en voleroit sus l'aile de ma ryme.

But Shakespeare, like Ronsard, knew Horace's far-famed Ode (bk. iii. 30)

Exegi monumentum aere perennius Regalique situ pyramidum altius, Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens Possit diruere, aut innumerabilis Annorum series, et fuga temporum.

Nor can there be any doubt that Shakespeare wrote with a direct reference to the concluding nine lines of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ (xv. 871-9):

Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira nec ignes, Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas. Cum volet illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis hujus Jus habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aevi; Parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis Astra ferar nomenque erit indelebile nostrum.

This passage was familiar to Shakespeare in one of his favourite books--Golding's translation of the _Metamorphoses_. Golding's rendering opens:

Now have I brought a worke to end which neither Jove's fierce wrath Nor sword nor fire nor fretting age, with all the force it hath Are able to abolish quite, &c.

Meres, after his mention of Shakespeare's sonnets in his _Palladis Tamia_ (1598), quotes parts of both passages from Horace and Ovid, and gives a Latin paraphrase of his own, which, he says, would fit the lips of our contemporary poets besides Shakespeare. The introduction of the name Mars into Meres's paraphrase as well as into line 7 of Shakespeare's Sonnet lv. led Mr. Tyler (on what are in any case very trivial grounds) to the assumption that Shakespeare was borrowing from his admiring critic, and was therefore writing after 1598, when Meres's book was published. In Golding's translation reference is made to Mars by name (the Latin here calls the god Gradivus) a few lines above the passage already quoted, and the word caught Shakespeare's eye there. Shakespeare owed nothing to Meres's paraphrase, but Meres probably owed much to passages in Shakespeare's sonnets.

{118a} See Appendix VIII., 'The Will Sonnets,' for the interpretation of Shakespeare's conceit and like efforts of Barnes.

{118b} Wires in the sense of hair was peculiarly distinctive of the sonnetteers' affected vocabulary. Cf. Daniel's _Delia_, 1591, No. xxvi., 'And golden hair may change to silver _wire_;' Lodge's _Phillis_, 1595, 'Made blush the beauties of her curled _wire_;' Barnes's _Parthenophil_, sonnet xlviii., 'Her hairs no grace of golden _wires_ want.' The comparison of lips with coral is not uncommon outside the Elizabethan sonnet, but it was universal there. Cf. 'Coral-coloured lips' (_Zepheria_, 1594, No. xxiii.); 'No coral is her lip' (Lodge's _Phillis_, 1595, No. viii.) 'Ce beau coral' are the opening words of Ronsard's _Amours_,