Note 113b — VIII—THE BORROWED CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS

The Greek epigram is in Palatine Anthology, ix. 627, and is translated into Latin in Selecta Epigrammata, Basel, 1529. The Greek lines relate, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets, how a nymph who sought to quench love’s torch in a fountain only succeeded in heating the water. An added detail Shakespeare borrowed from a very recent adaptation of the epigram in Giles Fletcher’s Licia, 1593 (Sonnet xxvii.), where the poet’s Love bathes in the fountain, with the result not only that ‘she touched the water and it burnt with Love,’ but also