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- 62 SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
the great Shakespearean critics of the past century, declined to commit himself without damaging reserves to the strain of eulogy. At the same time differences have continued to prevail as to the precise significance of the poems, even amongst those whose poetic insight entitle their opinion to the most respectful hearing. Coleridge and Robert Browning refused to accept the autobiographic interpretation which commended itself to Wordsworth and Shelley. Great weight was attached to Hallam’s censure of the literal theory: ‘There is a weakness and folly in all excessive and misplaced affection, which is not redeemed by the touches of nobler sentiments that abound in this long series of sonnets.’ The controversy is not yet ended. But the problem, in the present writer’s opinion, involves in only a secondary degree vexed questions of psychology or aesthetics. The discussion must primarily resolve itself into an historical inquiry respecting the conditions and conventions which moulded the literary expression of sentiment and passion in Elizabethan England.
## VI
Census of copies.
Copies of the 1609 edition of the *Sonnets* are now very scarce. A somewhat wide study of sale catalogues of the past 150 years reveals the presence in the book market of barely a dozen during that period. Many years have passed since a copy was sold at public auction, and the only recent evidence of the selling value of the book is the fact that the copy No. IX, *infra*, which was sold by public auction in 1864 for £225 15s. o.d., was acquired privately, a quarter of a century later, by a collector of New York for a thousand pounds. Of the eleven traceable copies which are enumerated below, one lacks the title-page,
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