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some high-sounding embellishments of the accepted formula suggested by his author’s writing. In his dedication of the ‘Sonnets’ to ‘Mr. W. H.’ he grafted on the common formula a reference to the immortality which Shakespeare, after the habit of contemporary sonnetteers, promised the hero of his sonnets in the pages that succeeded. With characteristic magniloquence, Thorpe added the decorative and supererogatory phrase, ‘promised by our ever-living poet,’ to the conventional dedicatory wish for his patron’s ‘all happiness’ and ‘eternitie.’

Five dedications by Thorpe.

Thorpe, as far as is known, penned only one dedication before that to Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets.’ His dedicatory experience was previously limited to the inscription of Marlowe’s ‘Lucan’ in 1600 to Blount, his friend in the trade. Three dedications by Thorpe survive of a date subsequent to the issue of the ‘Sonnets.’ One of these is addressed to John Florio, and the other two to the Earl of Pembroke. But these three dedications all prefaced volumes of translations by one John Healey, whose manuscripts had become Thorpe’s prey after the author had emigrated to Virginia, where he died shortly after landing. Thorpe chose, he tells us, Florio and the Earl of Pembroke as patrons of Healey’s unprinted manuscripts because they had been patrons of Healey before his expatriation and death. There is evidence to prove that in choosing a patron for the ‘Sonnets,’ and penning a dedication for the second time, he pursued the exact procedure that he had followed—deliberately and for reasons that he fully stated—in his first and only preceding dedicatory venture. He chose his patron from the circle of his trade associates, and it must have been because his patron was a personal friend that he addressed him by his initials, ‘W. H.’

‘W. H.’ signs dedication of Southwell’s poems in 1606.

Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ is not the only volume of the period in the introductory pages of which the initials ‘W. H.’ play a prominent part. In 1606 one who concealed himself under the same letters performed for ‘A Foure-fould Meditation’ (a collection of pious poems which the Jesuit Robert Southwell left in manuscript at his death) the identical service that Thorpe performed for Marlowe’s ‘Lucan’ in 1600, and for Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ in 1609. In 1606 Southwell’s manuscript fell into the hands of this ‘W. H.,’ and he published it through the agency of the printer, George Eld, and of an insignificant bookseller, Francis Burton. ‘W. H.,’ in his capacity of owner, supplied the dedication with his own pen under his initials. Of the Jesuit’s newly recovered poems ‘W. H.’ wrote, ‘Long have they lien hidden in obscuritie, and haply had never scene the light, had not a meere accident conveyed them to my hands. But, having seriously perused them, loath I was that any who are religiously affected, should be deprived of so great a comfort, as the due consideration thereof may bring unto them.’ ‘W. H.’ chose as patron of his venture one Mathew Saunders, Esq., and to the dedicatory epistle prefixed a conventional salutation wishing Saunders long life and prosperity. The greeting was printed in large and bold type thus:—

To the Right Worfhipfull and

Vertuous Gentleman, Mathew

Saunders, Efquire

W.H. wifheth, with long life, a profperous

achieuement of his good defires.

There follows in small type, regularly printed across the page, a dedicatory letter—the frequent sequel of the dedicatory salutation—in which the writer, ‘W.H.,’ commends the religious temper of ‘these meditations’ and deprecates the coldness and sterility of his own ‘conceits.’ The dedicator signs himself at the bottom of the page ‘Your Worships unfained affectionate, W.H.’

The two books—Southwell’s ‘Foure-fould Meditation’ of 1606, and Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ of 1609—have more in common than the appearance on the preliminary pages of the initials ‘W. H.’ in a prominent place, and of the common form of dedicatory salutation. Both volumes, it was announced on the title-pages, came from the same press—the press of George Eld. Eld for many