Critically appraised, Warton's treatment of the Elizabethan sonnet seems skimpy. To dismiss the sonnet in one third the amount of space devoted to Joseph Hall's _Virgidemiarum_ seems to betray a want of proportion. Perhaps even more damaging may seem the fact that Warton failed to mention more sonnet collections than he discussed. About twenty years later, in 1802, Joseph Ritson listed in his _Bibliographia Poetica_ the sonnet collections of Barnaby Barnes, Thomas Lodge, William Percy, and John Soowthern--all evidently unknown to Warton. But Warton was not particularly slipshod in his researches. In his immediately preceding section, on Elizabethan satire, he had stopped at 1600; and in the continuation he deliberately omitted the sonnet collections published after that date. Thus, though he had earlier in the _History_ (III, 264, n.) promised a discussion of Drayton, he omitted him here because his sonnets were continually being augmented until 1619. Two sixteenth century collections which Warton had mentioned earlier in the _History_ (III, 402, n.) he failed to discuss here, William Smith's _Chloris_ (1596) and Henry Lock's _Sundry Christian Passions, contayned in two hundred Sonnets_ (1593). Concerning Lock he had quoted significantly (IV, 8-9) from _The Return from Parnassus_: "'Locke and Hudson, sleep you quiet shavers among the shavings of the press, and let your books lie in some old nook amongst old boots and shoes, so you may avoid my censure.'" A collection which certainly did not need to avoid censure was Sir Philip Sidney's _Astrophel and Stella_; and for Warton's total neglect of Sidney's sonnets it seems difficult to account, for in this section on the sonnet Sidney as a poet would have been most aptly discussed. The _Astrophel and Stella_ was easily available in eighteenth-century editions of Sidney's works, and Warton admired the author. Both Thomas and Joseph Warton, however, venerated Sidney mainly for his _Arcadia_ and his _Apology for Poetry_. For Joseph Warton, Sidney was the prime English exhibit of great writers who have not, he thought, "been able to express themselves with beauty and propriety in the fetters of verse."[1] And Thomas Warton quoted evidently only once from Sidney's verse,[1] and then only by way of _England's Helicon_.[2] The omission of Sidney, then, is the glaring defect; of the dozen or so other Elizabethan sonnet collections which escaped Warton, most were absolutely or practically unknown, and none seem to have been available to him in the Bodleian or the British Museum.