* Shakespeare's Sonnets, never before interpreted. London, 1866. Vide, a volume "Remarks on the Sonnets of Shakespeare, showing that they belong to the Hermetic class of writings, and explaining their general meaning and purpose." New York: James Miller, 1866. Printed Anonymous, but written by Judge E. A. Hitchcock. But all these commentators alike agree to ignore the fact that William Shakespeare did not dedicate the sonnets to any body, or, so far as we know, procure Thomas Thorpe to do so for him. A poem, "The Phoenix and the Turtle," is sometimes bound up with these, described as "Verses among the Additional Poems to Love's Martyr; or, Rosalin's Complaint," printed in 1601, but nobody knows by what authority, except that publishers have got into the habit of doing so. Then, again, anonymous authorship was a fashionable pastime among the gallants and the gentle of this Elizabethan day, and joint authorship a familiar feature in Elizabethan letters. It is said that the great dramas we call Shakespeare's so persistently nowadays, and which began to appear unheralded at about this time, bear internal traces of courtly and aristocratic authorship. The diction is stately and sedate. No peasant-born author could have assumed and sustained so haughty a contempt for every thing below a baronet (for only at least that grade of humanity--it is said by those who have carefully examined the drama in this view *--does any virtuous or praiseworthy attribute appear in a Shakespearean character: while every thing below is exceedingly comic and irresistible, but still "base, common, and popular"). * Mr. Wilkes' Shakespeare from an American Point of View. New York: Appletons, 1876,