His Life and Genius 181 



of Shakspeare's life in London, drawing their 

 spirit and substance from what he saw, felt and 

 thought in his pilgrimage. To the easy objection 

 that he never could have thus exposed his private 

 feelings to public view, the simple and easy 

 answer is that they were only circulated privately 

 at first, and that it is not certain they were ever 

 intended for public perusal. It is a question, 

 indeed, whether they were ultimately published 

 with his open consent.* Written separately 

 perhaps as occasional pieces, according as he 

 conceived the central thought of each sonnet, one 

 may well suppose that he would hardly like such 

 masterpieces of poetic art, when perfected and 

 collected, to be quite lost. All the more unlikely 

 seeing that some of them had been surreptitiously 

 printed and others might eventually have been 

 likewise pirated. 



It is nowise beyond belief — is perhaps the most 

 likely key to them — that the special plaintive out- 

 pour of his wrongs as a forlorn lover, basely 

 betrayed by mistress and friend, was thus poetic- 

 ally vented for the perusal and amusement of the 



* Such anonymous publication of that which the author did 

 not care openly to father, though he could not bear to destroy 

 it, was not unexampled. Edward Blount, a respectable book- 

 seller and himself a man of letters, who was a partner in the 

 first edition of Shakspeare, spoke of Harle's l\Iicrocosmographie 

 as "so many dispersed transcripts which obliged him to play 

 the midwife to these infants which the father would have 

 smothered." 



