f my researches into Thorpe's history, his
methods of business, and the significance of his dedicatory addresses, of
which four are extant besides that prefixed to the volume of
Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609, are given in Appendix V., 'The True
History of Thomas Thorpe and "Mr. W. H."'

{95b} The form of fourteen-line stanza adopted by Shakespeare is in no
way peculiar to himself. It is the type recognised by Elizabethan
writers on metre as correct and customary in England long before he
wrote. George Gascoigne, in his _Certayne Notes of Instruction
concerning the making of Verse or Ryme in English_ (published in
Gascoigne's _Posies_, 1575), defined sonnets thus: 'Fouretene lynes,
every lyne conteyning tenne syllables. The first twelve to ryme in
staves of foure lynes by cross metre and the last two ryming togither, do
conclude the whole.' In twenty-one of the 108 sonnets of which Sidney's
collection entitled _Astrophel and Stella_ consists, the rhymes are on
the foreign model and the final couplet is avoided. But these are
exceptional. As is not uncommon in Elizabethan sonnet-collections, one
of Shakespeare's sonnets (xcix.) has fifteen lines; another (cxxvi.) has
only twelve lines, and those in rhymed couplets (cf. Lodge's _Phillis_,
Nos. viii. and xxvi.) and a third (cxlv.) is in octosyllabics. But it is
very doubtful whether the second and third of these sonnets rightly
belong to Shakespeare's collection. They were probably written as
independent lyrics: see p. 97, note 1.

{96} If the critical ingenuity which has detected a continuous thread of
narrative in the order that Thorpe printed Shakespeare's sonnets were
applied to the booksellers' miscellany of sonnets called _Diana_ (1594),
that volume, which rakes together sonnets on all kinds of amorous
subjects from all quarters and numbers them consecutively, could be made
to reveal the sequence of an individual lover's moods quite as readily,
and, if no external evidence were admitted, quite as convincingly, as
Thorpe's collection of Shakespeare's sonnets. Almost all Elizabethan
sonnets are not merely in the like metre, but are pitched in what sounds
superficially to be the same key of pleading or yearning. Thus almost
every collection gives at a first perusal a specious and delusive
impression of homogeneity.

{97} Shakespeare merely warns his 'lovely boy' that, though he be now
the 'minion' of Nature's 'pleasure,' he will not succeed in defying
Tim