ntrigued by a statement of
Thomas Warton that he had examined a copy of the _Sonnets_ published in
1599--a decade before the accepted date of the first edition. The
literary historian will be interested in, inter alia, unpublished
information concerning the university career of Samuel Daniel and in the
theory that Shakespeare's sonnets should be interpreted as if addressed
by a woman to her lover.

Critically appraised, Warton's treatment of the Elizabethan sonnet seems
skimpy. To dismiss the sonnet in one third the amount of space devoted
to Joseph Hall's _Virgidemiarum_ seems to betray a want of proportion.
Perhaps even more damaging may seem the fact that Warton failed to
mention more sonnet collections than he discussed. About twenty years
later, in 1802, Joseph Ritson listed in his _Bibliographia Poetica_ the
sonnet collections of Barnaby Barnes, Thomas Lodge, William Percy, and
John Soowthern--all evidently unknown to Warton. But Warton was not
particularly slipshod in his researches. In his immediately preceding
section, on Elizabethan satire, he had stopped at 1600; and in the
continuation he deliberately omitted the sonnet collections published
after that date. Thus, though he had earlier in the _History_ (III, 264,
n.) promised a discussion of Drayton, he omitted him here because his
sonnets were continually being augmented until 1619. Two sixteenth
century collections which Warton had mentioned earlier in the _History_
(III, 402, n.) he failed to discuss here, William Smith's _Chloris_
(1596) and Henry Lock's _Sundry Christian Passions, contayned in two
hundred Sonnets_ (1593). Concerning Lock he had quoted significantly
(IV, 8-9) from _The Return from Parnassus_: "'Locke and Hudson, sleep
you quiet shavers among the shavings of the press, and let your books
lie in some old nook amongst old boots and shoes, so you may avoid my
censure.'" A collection which certainly did not need to avoid censure
was Sir Philip Sidney's _Astrophel and Stella_; and for Warton's total
neglect of Sidney's sonnets it seems difficult to account, for in this
section on the sonnet Sidney as a poet would have been most aptly
discussed. The _Astrophel and Stella_ was easily available in
eighteenth-century editions of Sidney's works, and Warton admired the
author. Both Thomas and Joseph Warton, however, venerated Sidney mainly
for his _Arcadia_ and his _Apology for Poetry_. For Joseph Warton,
Sidney was the prime English exhibit of grea