he 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
oy'r sonnetes by W. S. vj'd" (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 com