Note 14 — Chapter II · MUSIC, SPEECHES, AND LITERATURE.

Mr. Lee has collected an amount of evidence which seems to prove that T. T., i.e., Thomas Thorpe, who wrote the dedication, was not only a piratical publisher, but also a humourist. The dedication, read in the light of these observations, acquires a character of jocularity, and begetter means procurer or getter. Thorpe thus becomes what we know Curll to have been a century later, a printer of stolen copy, with a turn for cynical waggery. Mr. W. H., the begetter, accordingly, is not a glittering aristocrat, but an unscrupulous go-between, who has made free with somebody's escritoire, and handed the sonnets over to the gay T. T.!