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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,

C. F. CLAY, MANAGER.

London: FETTER LANE, E.C.

Glasgow: 50, WELLINGTON STREET.

Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS.

New York: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.

[All Rights reserved]

Soth.
8-30-28
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IN

NOTE.

N 1718 a folio edition of Prior's poems was published by subscription, containing all the poems previously issued by him which he wished to acknowledge and preserve, carefully revised, and accompanied by others then printed for the first time. This folio was issued in three sizes. It will be remembered that a passage in Prior's will runs thus :-'To the College of St. John the Evangelist, in Cambridge, I leave Such and so many of my Books, as shall be judged to amount unto the Value of Two Hundred Pounds: These Books, with my own Poems in the greatest Paper, to be kept in the Library, together with the Books which I have already given.' Of these eighteenth-century examples of large-paper issues Mr Austin Dobson remarks, 'with the small copy of 1718, Johnson might have knocked down Osborne the bookseller; with the same work in its tallest form....Osborne the bookseller might have laid prostrate the "Great Lexicographer" himself.' Those who have seen the 'greatest' copy will not doubt the truth of this statement. Desirous of being suitably equipped in this Battle of the Books,' I have used a medium copy as the basis of the present text, a copy measuring 16 ins. x 10 ins. Even this is a handsome folio, with engraved initial letters, head-pieces and tail-pieces, of the usual mythological nature. 'The Names of the Subscribers' who received the volume in

1719 in exchange for some four thousand guineas are
duly given. These names occupy twenty double-
columned pages, and it did not seem desirable to
reprint them here. The Reverend Dr Peter Drelincourt,
Dean of Armagh, known to students of Defoe, in con-
nection with The Apparition of Mrs Veal,' is a sub-
scriber; William Congreve, Esq., Sir Godfrey Kneller,
Bar., Sir Isaac Newton, each take a copy, and so does
Alexander Pope, Esq.; while Jonathan Swift, D.D.,
Dean of St. Patricks, Dublin, subscribes for Five
Books,' and, low down on the list, appears the name of
Sir John Vanbrugh, architect and dramatist.

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Two or three previous collections of Prior's poems
had appeared. In 1707 a volume entitled Poems on
Several Occasions: consisting of Odes, Satyrs and
Epistles; With some Select Translations and Imitations,'
was published bearing the imprint, London: Printed
for R. Burrough, and J. Baker, at the Sun and Moon in
Cornhill, and E. Curll, at the Peacock without Temple-
Bar,' with three lines from Roscommon on the title-
page:

'Be not too Rigidly Censorious;

A String may Farr, in the Best Master's Hand,
And the most Skilful Archer miss his Aim.'
Its Contents are given in the Appendix to the present
edition (p. 362). Two years later, Prior published a
volume of 'Poems on Several Occasions. London: Printed
for Jacob Tonson, within Grays-Inn Gate next Grays-Inn
Lane,' in the Preface to which, referring to the issue
of 1707, he says: a Collection of Poems has lately ap-
peared under my Name, tho' without my Knowledge, in
which the Publisher has given me the Honour of some
Things that did not belong to me, and has Transcribed
others so imperfectly, that I hardly knew them to be mine.'

(See p. xxiii, the Preface and Dedication of the 1709 volume forming a part of the edition of 1718.) Since all the poems in the 1707 edition save the first two ('A Satyr, on the Modern Translators of Ovid's Epistles' and 'The Seventh Satyr of Juvenal, imitated') are known to be by Prior, the first portion of the above disclaimer must refer to these two. They will be included in the second volume of the present edition, and they need not, therefore, be discussed here. A collation of the earlier issues of Prior's publications with his later collected versions induces the belief that the second portion of the above disclaimer may also be regarded in a diplomatic or Pickwickian sense. A reference to the variants given in the Appendix to this volume will show that Prior's final forms, especially in his State Odes, differ as greatly from their earlier acknowledged versions as do the texts of the poems of 1709 from the imperfectly...Transcribed' copies of 1707, and it will be seen that, in the case of the Prologue, spoken at Court before the Queen, On Her Majesty's Birth-Day, 1704,' Prior's first version of 1704 is practically identical with the 1707 'unauthorised version, though greatly altered when he issued, in 1709, the indifferent Collection of Poems, for fear of being thought the Author of a worse.'

On the whole, therefore, it seemed best to give in the present volume, the text of Prior's last collected issue, following the folio of 1718, and in the Appendix to give not only the variants of the acknowledged edition of 1709, but also (a) those of the separate early states of the poems where possible, (b) those of the repudiated collection of 1707, and (c) those of 'A Second Collection of Poems on Several Occasions. By Matthew Prior, Esq.,' which was published in London in 1716, Printed for J. Roberts near the Oxford Arms

in Warwick-Lane. Price One Shilling.' The four collections are distinguished in the Notes by the letters A (= 1707), B (= 1709), C (= 1716) and D (= 1718). A( The 1716 edition also was disowned, in the London Gazette, March 24, 1716. There can be little doubt, however, of the truth of Pope's statement (Letters, ed. Elwin and Courthope, iii. 194-5) that Mr Prior himself thought it prudent to disown' certain poems, i.e. the two Satires above referred to, which also appear in the 1716 volume. For the contents of C see Appendix, p. 362.

The original spelling and punctuation, etc., of the folio of 1718 have been preserved, and the few misprints corrected are noted. The folio is excellently printed, the errors of the press are remarkably few, and there is no doubt that it presents the final form of those poems which at the date of its publication Prior wished to

preserve.

I have not reprinted the Latin version of the Carmen Seculare, by Tho. Dibben, of Trinity College, Cambridge, referred to in the Preface (p. xxiii), nor The Nut-brown Maid. A Poem, written Three Hundred Years Since, upon which Prior's Henry and Emma (pp. 138-158) was modelled. Mrs Elizabeth Singer's Pastoral (see pp. 26 and 27) has been printed in smaller type to differentiate it from Prior's own work, and the same course has been adopted in a few other similar

cases.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the help given me by Mr George A. Brown in the collation of some of the early editions.

The second volume of the present edition is in the press. It will contain the remainder of Prior's writings in prose and verse, the poems published before the

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