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THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM

VOL. X

481

2 I

INTRODUCTION

THIS miscellany appeared in 1599, with the following title:

:

THE PASSIONATE | PILGRIME. | By W. Shakespeare. | AT LONDON. Printed for W. Jaggard, and are to be sold by W. Leake, at the Grey-hound in Paules Churchyard. | 1599.

A new edition appeared in 1612, with additions derived from Thomas Heywood, and a modified title:

THE PASSIONATE PILGRIME | or | Certaine Amorous Sonnets, betweene Venus and Adonis, | newly corrected and augmented. | By W. Shakespere. | The third Edition. Whereunto is newly added two Loue-Epistles, the first from Paris to Hellen, and Hellen's answere backe | again to Paris.

In the course of the same year, Thomas Heywood complained in the dedicatory epistle prefixed to his Apology for Astus, of the 'manifest injury' done him, as well as to Shakespeare, by this surreptitious publication : : whereupon Jaggard printed a new title-page omitting Shakespeare's name. In Malone's copy (now in the Bodleian) the old title-page, by an inadvertence, was retained when the new was added.

A third edition, still further enlarged from equally unauthentic sources, appeared in 1640.

The contents even of the first edition show that

the book was a miscellany, raked together by fair means or foul and floated with the great name, already, as we may judge from Meres' tribute, at the head of English letters,-to which not more than five of the twenty-one pieces (viz. I, II, III, V, XVII) can certainly be ascribed. Three of the other pieces, however, though they had no right to their place, were not unworthy of it,-those by Barnfield (viii, XXI) and by Marlowe (xx).

THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM

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I

WHEN my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor❜d youth,
Unskilful in the world's false forgeries.

Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although I know my years be past the best,

I smiling credit her false-speaking tongue,
Outfacing faults in love with love's ill rest.
But wherefore says my love that she is young?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love's best habit is a soothing tongue,
And age, in love, loves not to have years told.
Therefore I'll lie with love, and love with me,
Since that our faults in love thus smother'd be.

II

Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
That like two spirits do suggest me still;
My better angel is a man right fair,
My worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her fair pride.

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i. and ii. are Shakespeare's Sonnets cxxxviii. and cxliv. with certain verbal alterations.

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