Now, Mr. Thompson believes that this "great person" was William Herbert, who read them among the friends of the putative author--was, in short, the "W. H." Mr. Thompson points out that, if these sonnets are not Bacon's _Sonnet_, the latter has never been found, among Bacon's papers or elsewhere. If these are the sonnets distributed by William Shakespeare among his private friends--of which Meres seems to have known in 1598--there would be this historical difficulty in connecting them with Lord Herbert, afterwards Earl of Pembroke, viz: In the Sydney Papers * is preserved a letter from Rowland White to Sir Robert Sydney, in which the writer says: "My Lord Herbert hath, with much ado, brought his father to consent that he may live at London, but not before the next spring." This letter is dated April 19,1597. "The next spring" would be 1598, the very year in which Meres speaks of these sonnets as in existence among William Shakespeare's friends. Of course, they might have been afterwards collected and dedicated by their author. * Vol. II., p. 43. But at the time they were so collected, Lord Herbert was Earl Pembroke, and was surely not _then_, if he had ever been (which he had {282}not), plain "Mr. H." In other words, if the sonnets were William Shakespeare's, he must either have dedicated them to a stranger--a boy at Oxford--or have waited until that hoy had become of age and an earl, and then dedicated them to him in either case by a title not his own. In the absence of explanation., nowadays, we would be obliged to regard such a dedication an insult rather than a compliment. And men were at least no less punctilious about titles in the age of Elizabeth than they are to-day. It is interesting, in this connection, to note that in 1595, and while young Lord Herbert was at Oxford, a play, "Edward III.," was entered in the register of the Stationers' Company. In both this play and in Sonnett XCIV. occur the line,= ```"Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."= Were there _any_ means of ascertaining in which the line is original and in which quotation, it might be of aid in solving this question of authorship. But, unhappily, none are at hand. Mr. Hiel believes that "W. H." means "William Hathaway," Shakespeare's brother-in-law, and that "onlie begetter" of these sonnets means "only collector;" (going into considerable philology to make good his assertion), and that Hathaway collected his broth-er-in-law's manuscripts and carried them to Thorpe. Mr. Massey has, for his part, constructed a tremendous romance out of the sonnets, * in which "W. H." means {283}William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.