must not be confounded with Mr. Henry Browne) appears to be Mr. Massey’s special aversion.  The very name of Brown irritates him as scarlet does an excitable bull.  Armitage Brown was the intimate friend of Keats and Landor, and, Severn says, was considered to know more about the Sonnets than any man then living, while the “personal theory,” as Mr. Massey styles it, has had a far larger number of supporters than any other.  Unfortunately, the opinions of others have not the slightest weight with Mr. Massey, and words are too weak to express his scorn of this theory and its supporters.  Mr. Brown wraps things in a winding sheet of witless words (delicious alliteration!); he leaves the subject dark and dubious as ever; his theory has only served to trouble deep waters, and make them so muddy that it is impossible to see to the bottom; in short, Mr. Brown and his fellow thinkers, in the opinion of Mr. Massey, are arch-deceivers and audacious misinterpreters, and have no more idea of what Shakespeare meant than they have of telling the truth about it.  Why Mr. Massey should have worked himself into a passion before he began to write is a mystery darker than any he attempts to solve, but the intemperate, bitter and self-conceited tone of the whole book is alone an immense injury to its critical value.

In constructing his elaborate theory of the Sonnets, Mr. Massey has committed many grave offences against the rules of criticism.  He has gone to his work with the strongest possible prejudices; he has begun it with certain preconceived ideas of what Shakespeare meant to write; he has found it necessary to destroy entirely the order of the poems, and to rearrange them, even sometimes to alter the text, to fit his own notions; and he has carried his investigations into such puerile and minute twistings of the text as can only be paralleled by Mr. Page’s quotation in support of his scar.  For instance, in Sonnet 78 occur these lines: 

    Thine eyes that taught the dumb on high to sing
      And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
    Have added feathers to the learned’s wing
      And given grace a double majesty.

Mr. Massey thinks that in this quatrain (which the vulgar mind would accept as it stands, nor expect to treat as other than figurative) Shakespeare was passing in review the writers under the patronage of the earl of Southampton, to whom the sonnet is addressed, and that he can identify the four personifications!  Shakespeare of course is the Dumb taught to sing by the favor of the earl; resolute John Florio, the translator of Montaigne, is Heavy Ignorance; Tom Nash is the Learned, who has had feathers added to his wing; and Marlowe is the Grace to whom is given a double majesty!  Marlowe’s chief characteristic was majesty, says Mr. Massey; therefore, we suppose, he is spoken of as grace.  The rest of his “exquisite reasons” may be found at pages 134-143 of the book.

This is nothing, however, to the feats of which Mr. Massey’s subtlety is capable.  Sonnet 38 begins: