Introduction to the Sonnets

For lines 1-63 vide ante, No. III, The Introduction to the 'Sheet of Sonnets'. Lines 64 to the end are omitted, and the last paragraph runs thus:

The Sonnet has been ever a favourite species of composition with me; but I am conscious that I have not succeeded in it. From a large number I have retained ten only, as seemed not beneath mediocrity. Whatever more is said of them, ponamus lucro.

S. T. Coleridge.

[Note. In a copy of the Edition of 1797, now in the Rowfant Library, S. T. C. comments in a marginal note on the words 'I have never yet been able to discover sense, nature, or poetic fancy in Petrarch's poems,' &c.—'A piece of petulant presumption, of which I should be more ashamed if I did not flatter myself that it stands alone in my writings. The best of the joke is that at the time I wrote it, I did not understand a word of Italian, and could therefore judge of this divine Poet only by bald translations of some half-dozen of his Sonnets.']

[Pp. 243-245.]