nothing at once new and true can now be profitably said in praise or in dispraise of them.  Of A Lover’s Complaint, marked as it is throughout with every possible sign suggestive of a far later date and a far different inspiration, I have only space or need to remark that it contains two of the most exquisitely Shakespearean verses ever vouchsafed to us by Shakespeare, and two of the most execrably euphuistic or dysphuistic lines ever inflicted on us by man.  Upon the Sonnets such a preposterous pyramid of presumptuous commentary has long since been reared by the Cimmerian speculation and Boeotian “brain-sweat” of sciolists and scholiasts, that no modest man will hope and no wise man will desire to add to the structure or subtract from it one single brick of proof or disproof, theorem or theory.  As yet the one contemporary book which has ever been supposed to throw any direct or indirect light on the mystic matter remains as inaccessible and unhelpful to students as though it had never been published fifteen years earlier than the date of their publication and four years before the book in which Meres notices the circulation of Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets among his private friends.”  It would be a most noble and thankworthy addition to a list of labours beyond praise and benefits beyond price, if my honoured friend Dr. Grosart could find the means to put a crown upon the achievements of his learning and a seal upon the obligations of our gratitude by the one inestimable boon long hoped for against hoping, and as yet but “a vision in a dream” to the most learned and most loving of true Shakespearean students; by the issue or reissue in its full and perfect likeness, collated at last and complete, of Willobie his Avisa. {63}

It was long since more than time that the worthless and impudent imposture called The Passionate Pilgrim should be exposed and expelled from its station at the far end of Shakespeare’s poems.  What Coleridge said of Ben Jonson’s epithet for “turtle-footed peace,” we may say of the label affixed to this rag-picker’s bag of stolen goods:  The Passionate Pilgrim is a pretty title, a very pretty title; pray what may it mean?  In all the larcenous little bundle of verse there is neither a poem which bears that name nor a poem by which that name would be bearable.  The publisher of the booklet was like “one Ragozine, a most notorious pirate”; and the method no less than the motive of his rascality in the present instance is palpable and simple enough.  Fired by the immediate and instantly proverbial popularity of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, he hired, we may suppose, some ready hack of unclean hand to supply him with three doggrel sonnets on the same subject, noticeable only for their porcine quality of prurience:  he procured by some means a rough copy or an incorrect transcript of two genuine and unpublished sonnets by Shakespeare, which with the acute instinct of a felonious tradesman he laid atop