His sonnets are pronounced by a large sect of critics not to possess certain qualities which they maintain to be indispensable to sonnets, with as much confidence, and as much reason, as their prototypes of old insisted on the unities of the drama.

I am an exoteric--utterly unable to explain the mysteries of this new poetical faith.

I only know that it is a faith, which except a man do keep pure and undefiled, without doubt he shall be called a blockhead.

I cannot, however, refrain from asking what is the particular virtue which belongs to fourteen as distinguished from all other numbers.

Does it arise from its being a multiple of seven?
Has this principle any reference to the sabbatical ordinance?
Or is it to the order of rhymes that these singular properties are attached?
Unhappily the sonnets of Shakspeare differ as much in this respect from those of Petrarch, as from a Spenserian or an octave stanza.