were published by me elsewhere, as I
state further on. The volume also contains some of my less faulty
translations, as from Sappho, AEschylus, Pythagoras, Virgil, Horace,
Dante, Petrarch, &c. And here I will give a chance specimen out of my
"Septuagint of Worthies," to each one of whom I have appropriated a page
or two of explanatory prose besides his fourteen lines of poetry. Take
my sonnet on "Sylva" Evelyn:--

"Wotton, fair Wotton, thine ancestral hall,
Thy green fresh meadows, coursed by ductile streams,
That ripple joyous in the noonday beams,
Leaping adown the frequent waterfall,
Thy princely forest, and calm slumbering lake
Are hallowed spots and classic precincts all;
For in thy terraced walks and beechen grove
The gentle, generous Evelyn wont to rove,
Peace-lover, who of nature's garden spake
From cedars to the hyssop on the wall!
O righteous spirit, fall'n on evil times,
Thy loyal zeal and learned piety
Blest all around thee, wept thy country's crimes,
And taught the world how Christians live and die."

The sonnet is a form of metrical composition which has been habitual
with me, as my volume "Three Hundred Sonnets" will go to prove; and I
have written quite a hundred more. The best always come at a burst,
spontaneously and as it were inspirationally. A laboured sonnet is a
dull piece of artificial rhyming, and as it springs not from the heart
of the writer, fails to reach the heart of the reader. If the metal does
not flow out quick and hot, there never can be a sharp casting. Good
sonnets are crystals of the heart and mind, perfect from beginning to
end, and are only unpopular where poetasters make a carnal toil of them
instead of finding them a spiritual pleasure. But one who knows his
theme may write reams about sonneteering; for instance, see that
striking article on Shakespeare's sonnets in a recent _Fortnightly_ (or
was it a _Contemporary_?) by Charles Mackay, himself one of our literary
worthiest, who has so well worked through a long life for his country
and his kind: my best regards to him.

His discovery, or rather ingenious hypothesis, quite new to me, is, that
some of the one hundred and fifty-four in that collection are by other
writers than Shakespeare, though falsely printed under his name, and
that some more (though by him) were written impersonately in the
characters of Essex and Elizabeth; which would account