A History of English Poetry: an Unpublished Continuation

38

Wits Tr. fol. 281. b. [The brackets in the text are Warton's.]

39

[Warton was of course much mistaken. Following the 1640 edition of Benson, Gildon had reprinted them under Shakespeare's name in 1709 (dated 1710) and again in 1714. The two Sewell editions appeared in 1725 and 1728. Invariably the poems seem to have been printed under Shakespeare's name, though perhaps not always in a collected edition of his complete poems. See Hyder Rollins's New Variorum edition of the Sonnets (Philadelphia, 1944).]

40

[See Malone's Supplement to the Edition of Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1780), I, 581.]

41

See supr. vol. iii. [p. 405].

42

Wits Tr. fol. 284. a. He is again mentioned by Meres for his distich on king James's Furies & Lepanto. fol. 284. b. [The distich, printed by Meres, is the final couplet of Barnfield's Sonnet II.]

43

Sonn. xii.

44

It begins thus.

Nights were short, and daies were long,
Blossoms on the hauthorns hong;
Philomel, night-musickes kinge,
Tolde the comming of the springe, &c.

He does not scruple to insert these lines,

Loue I did the fairest boy,
That these fields did ere enioy.
Loue I did faire Ganymed,
Venus darling, beauties bed, &c.

This piece was afterwards inserted in Englands Helicon.

45

See supr. vol. iii. p. [292, n.] I [am] now most inclined to think, that these initials mean Henry Constable, and not Henry Chettle. The Sonnets do not justify the applauses paid to Constable, by his contemporaries, Edmond Bolton, Meres, the author of the Return from Parnassus, and many others. Some of his sonnets are prefixed to Sydney's Apology for Poetry. The initials H. C. often occur in Englands Helicon. I take this opportunity of saying that some pieces of Chettle were among Mr. Beauclerc's books. (See supr. iii. [291-292, n.?]) [Indeed the annotations in the Harvard Library copy of the Bibliotheca Beauclerkiana (p. 102) suggest that either Thomas Warton or, more probably, his brother may have purchased the copy of Chettle's Englands Mourning Garment owned by Thomas Warton's former student. It was sold to "Dr. W."]

46

See supr. iii. [480.] [R. L. was Richard Lynch.]

47

In 16

. With vignettes. They are sixty two in number. The best is that which begins,

Venus, and yong Adonis sitting by her,
Vnder a myrtle shade began to woe him
She told the yongling, &c. Sonn. iii.

He calls Sleep, "Balme of the brused heart." Sonn. xv.