[25] Sonn. 97.
[26] They were sweet indeed, but they wanted animation; and, in appearance, they were nothing more than beautiful resemblances or copies of you.
[27] Sonn. 98.
[28] Sonn. 99.
[29] [Warton originally wrote "1609," but immediately scored it out and replaced it with "1599.">[
[30] In 16mo. With vignettes. Never entered in the Register of the Stationers. [Possibly Warton saw a volume registered by Eleazer Edgar on 3 January 1599/1600 as "A booke called Amours by J. D. with certen oyr sonnetes by W. S. vjd" (Arber's Stationers Register, III, 153). This entry may indicate that Edgar held manuscripts of some of Shakespeare's sonnets, and some copies of the book so registered may have been published. However, if Warton had seen this hypothetical volume he should have correctly identified it: he had already (III, 402, n.) printed the Edgar entry from the Stationers Register.
If this volume which Warton mentions ever actually existed, it cannot now be located. Concerning Warton's statement Mr. G. B. Oldham, Principal Keeper of Printed Books, British Museum, wrote as follows: "I have examined the sale catalogue which contains books from the library of the Reverend William Thomson of Queens College, Oxford, but have failed to find anything at all corresponding with the volume which Warton describes. There are not, in fact, many really scarce books in this catalogue and it rather looks as though the rarer items in Thomson's collection were otherwise disposed of. In any case I think there is a strong presumption that Warton's memory betrayed him."
Thus, in the absence of any evidence concerning a 1599 edition of the Sonnets and in the light of Thorpe's claim in 1609 that they were "Never before Imprinted," it seems probable that what Warton was vaguely recalling was actually a copy of Shakespeare's Passionate Pilgrim. This book, printed for Jaggard in 1599, my have misled Warton by its separate title page, Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Musicke. Such a volume as Warton describes was, it seems evident from surviving copies, frequently bound up to contain The Passionate Pilgrim, Venus and Adonis, and other small collections of poetry. The fact that Warton recollected the book as a l6mo. does not argue much against this identification. Though The Passionate Pilgrim is actually an octavo, surviving copies measure about 4-1/2 by 3-1/4 inches, and as late as 1911 William Jaggard, in his Shakespeare Bibliography (p. 429), described it as a 16mo.
In explanation of Warton's probable error two extenuating facts should be remembered. First, since Thomson died about 1766, Warton's recollection was at least fifteen years old; and second, only in 1780 did Edmond Malone edit the Sonnets and The Passionate Pilgrim as discriminate texts comprising Shakespeare's lyrics. Even then Malone omitted without comment the separate title page Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Musicke. Previously, except in George Steevens's edition of the Sonnets, Shakespeare's poems were lumped together, with lyrics of several other Elizabethan poets, and printed as Shakespeare's Poems on Several Occasions. Moreover, Warton was not the first to write of a 1599 edition of the Sonnets. His friend Bishop Percy may have helped to create this false impression in Warton's memory. In his interleaved copy of Langbaine's Account of the English Dramatick Poets, immediately after Oldys's statement that Shakespeare's Sonnets were not printed until 1609, Percy commented, "But this is a mistake. Lintot republished Shakespeare's Sonnets from an edition in 1599." Malone, in his transcript of Steevens's transcript of Percy, corrected Percy's mistake: "This is a mistake of Dr. Percy's. Lintot republished from old eds but not from any ed. of 1599, except a very few sonnets called the Passionate Pilgrim printed in that year." (Photostat of Bergen Evans's transcript of Bodleian Malone 129-132.) Warton, however, may well have been misled by Percy's comment, for in the winter of 1769 he had borrowed and used Percy's annotated copy of Langbaine. (The Percy Letters, The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton, ed. M. G. Robinson and Leah Dennis [Baton Rouge, 1951], pp. 135, 137.) It is unfortunate that the matter was not cleared up in discussion with Malone, whom at some time during the 1780's Warton furnished with a copy of the 1596 Venus and Adonis and with whom he corresponded around 1785 concerning sonnets in general and Shakespeare in particular. (William Shakespeare, Plays and Poems, ed. Edmond Malone [London, 1790] X, 13, n. 1; and James Prior, The Life of Edmond Malone [London, 1860], pp. 122-123.)]
[31] Wits Tr. fol. 281. b. [The brackets in the text are Warton's.]