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The *Passionate Pilgrim* is a collection of fourteen lyrical pieces, with an appendix of six pieces of identical character which are introduced by the separate title: ‘SONNETS To sundry notes of Musicke.’¹ The twenty pieces are of varied poetic merit.² Many have a touch of that ‘happy valiancy’ of rhythm and sentiment which is characteristic of the Elizabethan temper, but very few betray that union of simple feeling with verbal melody which is essential to lyrical perfection. Several are little more than pleasant jingles describing phases of the tender passion with a whimsical artificiality. The poems are in varied metres. Nine take the form of regular sonnets or quatorzains; five are in the
¹ The word ‘sonnet’ is here used in the common sense of ‘song’. The musical composer, William Byrd, published in 1587 his *Psalms, Sonets, and Songs of Sadness and Pietie*; but though he tells the reader that if he be disposed ‘to bee merrie, heere are Sonets’, and heads a section of the book ‘Sonets and Pastorales’, no poem bearing any relation to the sonnet form is included. No ‘quatorzain’ is included in the Appendix to *The Passionate Pilgrim*, of which the title may be paraphrased as ‘Songs set to various airs’. The ‘sundry notes of Musicke’ are only extant in the case of two poems; but it may be inferred that, before publication, all the six ‘Sonnets’ were ‘set’ by contemporary composers. Oldys’s guess, that John and Thomas Morley were the composers, is unconfirmed. Indirect evidence supports the conjecture that a lost edition of the *Sonnets* supplied the music. A poetic miscellany—‘Strange Histories’ by Thomas Deloney—of like character to *The Passionate Pilgrim* and with similar typographical ornaments, has at the head of each piece in the 1602 edition (unique copy at Britwell) a line of musical notes, which is absent from other known editions. Again, of the poetic collection entitled ‘The Teares or Lamentations of a Sorrowful Soule, by Sir William Leighton’ two editions are known—one (1613) giving the words only, and another (1614) adding the music.
² The total is usually given as twenty-one, but the pieces commonly numbered fourteen and fifteen form a single poem and are printed together in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s *Poems*, under the single heading ‘Loath to depart’. J. P. Collier’s proposal to divide the last piece also into two has been wisely ignored by recent editors. In the original editions the separate pieces were not numbered. Malone, in his reprint of *The Passionate Pilgrim* in his *Supplement* (1780), was the first editor to introduce a consecutive numerical notation.
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