SOME 'SENTIMENTS' ON SONNETS, WITH SUNDRY SPECIMENS.--Thanks to our ever-welcome correspondent, 'T. W. P.' for his pleasant, pertinent and improving sentiments on sonnets. Arriving at too late an hour for a place among our guests at the _table d' hote_, perhaps he will not object to sit at our humble side-table, and converse familiarly with the reader; since, as honest SANCHO remarked of the Duke, 'Wherever _he_ sits, there will be the _first place_.' Our friend has a fruitful theme. How many borrowed prose-passages have we seen, with their original brightness dimmed or deflected in a sorry sonnet! Nine in ten of our modern examples in this kind, when one comes to analyze them, will be found to consist of stolen ideas, combined with what SOUTHEY would call 'bubble, and bladder, and tympany.' But perpend the subjoined: 'Ever since the fatal days of PETRARCH AND GUIDO CAVALIANTI, mankind have suffered more or less from the chronic infliction of Sonnets. With them indeed the complaint was constitutional, and came in the natural way; under so mild and gentle a form withal, that little danger was to be apprehended for Italian temperaments, except a degree of languor, general debility, and a disagreeable singing in the ears. It was only when it worked its way into English blood, that the virus assumed its most baneful character. SHAKSPEARE, among other illustrious victims, was afflicted by it in his youth, but seems to have recovered during his residence in the metropolis. Possibly the favor of the royal hand might have proved more beneficial than that of the Earl of Southampton. Perhaps he was _touched_ for it by ELIZABETH, as JOHNSON was by Queen ANNE for the scrofula. However that may be, we know very well that the disorder is now rooted among us, and that every week produces decided cases of Sonnets, sometimes so severe as to be intolerable. In this condition of the mental health of our country, since the evil cannot be cured, it were a work at once philanthropical and patriotic, so to modify it and regulate its attacks, that it may settle down into a moderate degree of annoyance, like the lighter afflictions of mild measles and mumps. We can always calculate upon the duration of each 'fytte,' as none ever exceeds the fourteenth spasm. When the just dozen-and-two convulsions are past, the danger is over, and the offensive matter may be removed by a newspaper, or discharged into some appropriate magazine. There is good reason for designating the complaint as a _periodical_ one.