Upon the Sonnets such a
preposterous pyramid of presumptuous commentary has long since been
reared by the Cimmerian speculation and Boeotian "brain-sweat" of
sciolists and scholiasts, that no modest man will hope and no wise man
will desire to add to the structure or subtract from it one single brick
of proof or disproof, theorem or theory. As yet the one contemporary
book which has ever been supposed to throw any direct or indirect light
on the mystic matter remains as inaccessible and unhelpful to students as
though it had never been published fifteen years earlier than the date of
their publication and four years before the book in which Meres notices
the circulation of Shakespeare's "sugared sonnets among his private
friends." It would be a most noble and thankworthy addition to a list of
labours beyond praise and benefits beyond price, if my honoured friend
Dr. Grosart could find the means to put a crown upon the achievements of
his learning and a seal upon the obligations of our gratitude by the one
inestimable boon long hoped for against hoping, and as yet but "a vision
in a dream" to the most learned and most loving of true Shakespearean
students; by the issue or reissue in its full and perfect likeness,
collated at last and complete, of _Willobie his Avisa_.
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