for an awkward
confusion of the sexes hitherto inexplicable. Mackay thinks that the
publisher included any sonnets by others which he thought worthy of the
great bard, as if they were his, and so caused the injurious and wrong
appropriation; most of them are exquisite, and many undoubtedly
Shakespeare's; some I have said probably by another hand. Critically
speaking too, not one of all the one hundred and fifty-four is of the
conventional and elaborate fourteen-liner sort, with complicated rhymes;
but each is a lyrical gem of three four-line stanzas closed by a
distich. Milton's eighteen are all of the more artificial Petrarchian
sort; which Wordsworth has diligently made his model in more than four
hundred instances of very various degrees in merit.

As I am writing a short memoir of my books, I may state that my own
small quarto of sonnets grew out of the "Modern Pyramid."

CHAPTER XIV.

AN AUTHOR'S MIND: PROBABILITIES.

My next book, published by Bentley in 1841, is in some sort a
psychological curiosity,--its title being "An Author's Mind, the Book of
Title-pages;" and when I add that it contains in succession sketches of
thirty-four new brain-children, all struggling together for exit from my
occiput, it may be imagined how impelled I was to write them all down
(fixt, however briefly, in black and white) in order to get rid of them.
The book is printed as "edited" by me; whereas I wrote every word of it,
but had not then the courage to say so, as certain things therein might
well have offended some folks, and I did not wish that. I think I will
give here a bit of the prefatory "Ramble," to show how the emptying out
of my thought-box must have been a most wholesome, a most necessary
relief:--

* * * * *

"Now, reader, one little preliminary parley with you about myself. Here
beginneth the trouble of authorship, but it is a trouble causing ease;
ease from thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, which never cease to make one's
head ache till they are fixed on paper; ease from dreams by night and
reveries by day (thronging up in crowds behind, like Deucalion's
children, or a serried host in front, like Jason's instant army),
harassing the brain, and struggling for birth, a separate existence, a
definite life,--ease, in a cessation of that continuous internal hum of
aerial forget-me-nots, clamouring to be recorded. O happy unimaginable
vacancy of mind, to whistle as you walk for want