These poems waited for two hundred and thirty years to be discovered on a street bookstall! There are lines in them and whole passages in the unpublished _Centuries of Meditations_ which almost set one wondering with Sir Thomas Browne "whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of Time?" I am tempted, but will not be drawn to discuss how Traherne stands related to Vaughan on the one hand and Cowley on the other. I note the discovery here, and content myself with wondering if the reader share any of my pleasure in it and enjoyment of the process which brought it to pass. For me, I was born and bred a bookman. In my father's house the talk might run on divinity, politics, the theatre; but literature was the great thing. Other callings might do well enough, but writers were a class apart, and to be a great writer was the choicest of ambitions. I grew up in this habit of mind, and have not entirely outgrown it yet; have not so far outgrown it but that literary discussions, problems, discoveries engage me though they lie remote from literature's service to man (who has but a short while to live, and labour and vanity if he outlast it). I could join in a hunt after Bunyan's grandmothers, and have actually spent working days in trying to discover the historical facts of which _Robinson Crusoe_ may be an allegory. One half of my quarrel with those who try to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare rests on resentment of the time they force me to waste; and a new searcher for the secret of the Sonnets has only to whistle and I come to him--though, to be sure, that gentleman almost cured me who identified the Dark Lady with Ann Hathaway, resting his case upon-- SONNET CCXVIII. Whoever hath my wit, thou hast thy Will: And where is Will alive but _hath a way?_ So in device thy wit is starved still And as devised by Will. That is to say, My second-best best bed, yea, and the gear withal Thou hast; but all that capital messuage Known as New Place goes to Susanna Hall. Haply the disproportion may engage The harmless ail-too-wise which otherwise Might knot themselves disknitting of a clue That Bacon wrote me. Lastly, I devise My wit, to whom? To wit, to-whit, to-whoo! And here revoke all previous testaments: Witness, J. Shaw and Robert Whattcoat, Gents. After this confession you will pardon any small complacency that may happen to betray itself in the ensuing narrative. Mr. Dobell followed up his discovery of Traherne by announcing another _trouvaille_, and one which excited me not a little:--