Now, weighing, what almost every other personal event in our author's life establishes, the general moral beauty of his character, and reflecting, at the same time, that he was at this period a husband, and the father of a family, we cannot but feel _the most entire conviction_, that these sonnets were never directed to a _real_ object: but that, notwithstanding they appear written in his own person, and two of them, indeed, (Sonnets 135. and 136.) a perpetual pun on his Christian name, they were solely intended to express, aloof from all individual application, the contrarieties, the inconsistencies, and the miseries of illicit love. Credulity itself, we think, cannot suppose otherwise, and, at the same time, believe that the poet was privy to their publication. To this discussion of a subject clogged with so many difficulties, we shall now subjoin some remarks on the _poetical_ merits and demerits of our author's sonnets; and here, we are irresistibly induced to notice the absurd charge against, and the inadequate defence of, sonnet-writing, brought forward by Messrs. Steevens and Malone, in the Supplement of the latter gentleman.[74:A] The antipathy of Mr. Steevens to this species of lyric poetry, seems to have amounted to the highest pitch of extravagance. In a note on the fifty-fourth sonnet, he asks, "What has truth or nature to do with sonnets?" as if truth and nature were confined to any particular metre or mode of composition; and, in a subsequent page, he informs us that the sonnet is "a species of composition which has reduced the most exalted poets to a level with the meanest rhimers; has almost cut down Milton and Shakspeare to the standards of Pomfret and——but the name of Pomfret is perhaps the lowest in the scale of English versifiers."[74:B] Nothing can exceed the futility and bad taste of this remark, and yet Mr. Malone has advanced no other defence of the "exalted poets" of Italy than that, "_he is slow to believe that Petrarch is without merit_;" and for Milton he offers this strange apology,—"_that he generally failed when he attempted rhime, whether his verses assumed the shape of a sonnet, or any other form_."[74:C] When we recollect, that the noblest poets of Italy, from Dante to Alfieri, have employed their talents in the construction of the sonnet, and that many of their most popular and beautiful passages have been derived through this medium; when we recollect, that the first bards of our own country, from Surrey to Southey, have followed their example with an emulation which has conferred immortality on their efforts; when we further call to mind the exquisite specimens of rhimed poetry which Milton has given us in his L'Allegro and Il Penseroso; and when, above all, we retrace the dignity, the simplicity, the moral sublimity of many of his sonnets, perhaps not surpassed by any other part of his works, we stand amazed at the unqualified censure on the one hand, and at the impotency of the defence on the other.