In the British Library are ten large manuscript notebooks containing more than two thousand sonnets along with miscellaneous notes written by Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges during three years of his final "exile" in Geneva. There is something both fascinating and depressing about these untidily written volumes. Most of the poems are hastily written, the intermittent dating revealing several cases where Brydges has written as many as six or seven sonnets on a single day. There are some good and striking phrases irregularly scattered among much dross. A remarkable proportion of this collection of largely unpublished poetry is made up of sonnets about poets and poetry. There are poems, to take but a few examples, on Samuel Daniel, Edmund Spenser, Petrarch, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Robert Bloomfield, Thomas Chatterton, Torquato Tasso, and Abraham Cowley. There are sonnets on John Milton and on Milton's sonnets. Brydges's love of poetry...