Two years later the writer receives a letter from Erskine written from Cannes stating that, like the discoverer of the clue, he has committed suicide for the sake of a theory which he leaves to his friend as a sacred legacy stained with the blood of two lives. The writer rushes off to the Riviera only to find his friend dead, and to receive from his mother the ill-starred panel. The story ends with a true Wilde touch, for in a conversation with the doctor who had attended him, he learns that Erskine had died of consumption and had never committed suicide at all. So much for the setting, which is quite unimportant. The real matter of moment is, that the _Blackwood_ article is a really very valuable contribution to the controversy as to the identity of the mysterious Mr W. H. It will be remembered that the Sonnets were first issued in book form in 1609, by a sort of piratical bookseller of those days, called Thames Thorpe who, on his own responsibility, prefixed the edition with a dedication--"To the only-begotten of these insuing sonnets, Mr W. H., all happinesse and that eternite promised by our ever living poet wisheth the well wishing adventurer in setting forth. T. T." Round the identity of this W. H. there has long raged an ardent controversy. Most of the commentators have rushed to the conclusion that he must be the person to whom the Sonnets are addressed. Some have attempted to identify him as Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (the initials being reversed), who is known to have been an early patron of the poet, others without much apparent reason have assumed that the W. H. in question was none other than William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. The most probable theory is undoubtedly that of Mr Henry Lee, that the dedication is entirely Thorpe's own, that it has nothing whatever to do with Shakespeare or the inspirer of the poet, and that it was meant for William Hall, a sort of literary intermediary. In confirmation of this he adduces the undoubted fact that Thorpe had, at anyrate, once previously dedicated a work to its "begotten." One point is established almost beyond dispute--viz. that the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a young man and the remainder refer to a "dark woman" who, after having bewitched the author, casts her spell over his young friend and estranges the two. A counter-theory is that Shakespeare's selection of the sonnet, "that puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic composition," as Byron calls it, as a medium for his muse, is that he was experimenting in the style of writing which had become the fashion in England between the years 1591 and 1597.