Shakespearean students; by the issue or reissue in its full and perfect likeness, collated at last and complete, of Willobie his Avisa.[1]
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 in-
- ↑ Since this passage first went to press, I have received from Dr. Grosart the most happy news that he has procured a perfect copy of this precious volume, and will shortly add it to his occasional issues of golden waifs and strays forgotten by the ebb-tide of time. Not even the disinterment of Robert Chester's "glorified" poem, with its appended jewels of verse from Shakespeare's very hand and from others only less great than Shakespeare's, all now at last reset in their strange original framework, was a gift of greater price than this.
