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It was long since more than time that the worthless and impudent
imposture called _The Passionate Pilgrim_ should be exposed and expelled
from its station at the far end of Shakespeare's poems. What Coleridge
said of Ben Jonson's epithet for "turtle-footed peace," we may say of the
label affixed to this rag-picker's bag of stolen goods: _The Passionate
Pilgrim_ is a pretty title, a very pretty title; pray what may it mean?
In all the larcenous little bundle of verse there is neither a poem which
bears that name nor a poem by which that name would be bearable. The
publisher of the booklet was like "one Ragozine, a most notorious
pirate"; and the method no less than the motive of his rascality in the
present instance is palpable and simple enough. Fired by the immediate
and instantly proverbial popularity of Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_,
he hired, we may suppose, some ready hack of unclean hand to supply him
with three doggrel sonnets on the same subject, noticeable only for their
porcine quality of prurience: he procured by some means a rough copy or
an incorrect transcript of two genuine and unpublished sonnets by
Shakespeare, which with the acute instinct of a felonious tradesman he
laid atop of his worthless wares by way of gilding to their base metal:
he stole from the two years published text of _Love's Labour's Lost_, and
reproduced with more or less mutilation or corruption, the sonnet of
Longavile, the "canzonet" of Biron, and the far lovelier love-song of
Dumaine.


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