Page:Sir Walter Raleigh by Thoreau, Henry David,.djvu/32

 Poems, and by Ritson given to Davison. It also occurs in Lord Pembroke's Poems, and exists in two copies in the Harleian MSS."

To this comment, written in 1843-44, Archdeacon Hannah added in 1870, "It can be found in MSS. more than ten years earlier than 1608,—in 1596/1595, or 1593. There are five other claimants, but not one with a case that will bear the slightest examination. For the claim of Richard Edwards we are indebted to a mere mistake of Ellis's; for that of F. Davison to a freak of Ritson's; that of Lord Essex is only known from the correspondence of Percy, who did not believe it; and those of Sylvester and Lord Pembroke are sufficiently refuted by the mutilated character of the copies which were printed among their posthumous writings."

Thoreau evidently had his faith in Ralegh's authorship shaken by the attribution to Sylvester in 1843, and the printing then of the extended (rather than mutilated) copy as found in Sylvester, which he proceeded to compare with his earlier copy. As a result, the verses read by him at the