prising 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
ed's 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.]

[32] [Warton was of course much mistaken. Following the 1640 edition of
Benson, Gildon had reprinted them under Shakespeare's name in 1709
(dated 1710) and again in 1714. The two Sewell editions appeared in 1725
and 1728. Invariably the poems seem to have been printed under
Shakespeare's name, though perhaps not always in a collected edition of
his complete poems. See Hyder Rollins's New Variorum edition of the
_Sonnets_ (Philadelphia, 1944).]

[33] [See Malone's _Supplement to the Edition of Shakespear