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an incorrect transcript of two genuine and unpublished sonnets by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 of his worthless wares by way of gilding to their base metal:
he stole from the two years published text of _Love's Labour's Lost_, and
reproduced with more or less mutilation or corruption, the sonnet of
Longavile, the "canzonet" of Biron, and the far lovelier love-song of
Dumaine. The rest of the ragman's gatherings, with three most notable
exceptions, is little better for the most part than dry rubbish or
disgusting refuse; unless a plea may haply be put in for the pretty
commonplaces of the lines on a "sweet rose, fair flower," and so forth;
for the couple of thin and pallid if tender and tolerable copies of verse
on "Beauty" and "Good Night," or the passably light and lively stray of
song on "crabbed age and youth." I need not say that those three
exceptions are the stolen and garbled work of Marlowe and of Barnfield,
our elder Shelley and our first-born Keats; the singer of Cynthia in
verse well worthy of Endymion, who would seem to have died as a poet in
the same fatal year of his age that Keats died as a man; the first
adequate English laureate of the nightingale, to be supplanted or
equalled by none until the advent of