P. 46, No. xlix.--Shakespeare’s Sonnets are so heavily laden with meaning, so double-shotted, if one may so speak, with thought, so penetrated and pervaded with a repressed passion, that, packed as all this is into narrowest limits, it sometimes imparts no little obscurity to them; and they often require to be heard or read not once but many times, in fact to be studied, before they reveal to us all the treasures of thought and feeling which they contain. It is eminently so with this one. The subject, the bitter delusion of all sinful pleasures, the reaction of a swift remorse which inevitably dogs them, Shakespeare must have most deeply felt, as he has expressed himself upon it most profoundly. I know no picture of this at all so terrible in its truth as in _The Rape of Lucrece_ the description of Tarquin after he has successfully wrought his deed of shame. But this sonnet on the same theme is worthy to stand by its side. P. 48, No. lii.--These lines are appended to the second edition of Wastell’s _Microbiblion_, 1629; they are not found in the first, published under another title in 1623. I have not disturbed the ascription of them to him, although, considering the general worthlessness of the book, it must be considered very doubtful indeed. On the question of the authorship of these lines see Hannah, _Poems and Psalms of Henry King_, 1843, p. cxviii. P. 57, No. lxii.--There are at least half-a-dozen texts of this poem with an infinite variety of readings, these being particularly numerous in the third stanza, which I must needs think corrupt as it now stands. The _Reliquiæ Wottonianæ_, in which it was first published, appeared in 1651, some twelve years after Wotton’s death; but much earlier MS. copies are in existence; thus one in the handwriting of Edward Alleyn, apparently of date 1616. Ben Jonson visited Drummond of Hawthornden two or three years later, and is reported by him to have had these lines by heart. P. 58, No. lxiii.--This poem Bishop Percy believes to have been first printed in a volume of _Miscellaneous Poems by different hands_, published by David Lewis, 1726. The date and authorship is discussed on several occasions in _Notes and Queries_, vol. iii. (1st Series) pp. 27, 108, 155, but without much light being thrown upon either. P. 60, No. lxv.--Carew is commonly grouped with Waller, and subordinated to him. He is indeed immensely his superior. Waller never wrote a love-song in grace and fancy to compare with this; while in many of Carew’s lighter pieces there is an underlying vein of earnestness, which is wholly wanting in the other.