SUPRESSED BY THE AUTHOR
BEATTIE, James.
Original Poems and Translations.
London: Printed [by F. Douglas, Aberdeen?]; and sold by A. Millar, 1760.
[with:]
BEATTIE, James. The Minstrel, in two Books: with some other Poems … London, Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly … and W. Creech, in Edinburgh. 1779.
Two vols, 8vo, Poems: pp. x, [4],188; title-page dusty, else a very good copy, lower (and occasionally fore-) edge partly untrimmed; and Minstrel: pp. iv, [4], 107, [1]; some slight foxing but a very good copy, lower and outer edges partly untrimmed; bound in uniform nineteenth-century half dark red roan and marbled boards, rubbed, lettered as Beattie Poems Vols I and II; ownership inscriptions to Original Poems of Ludovick William Grant dated 1824, and Miss Emily Fraser.
First edition of Beattie’s first collection. It is always described as his first book, but it is in fact preceded by an unique Elegy on Mrs Walker (1759), discovered by us in 1991 and now in the National Library of Scotland (but still not listed by ESTC).
This collection apparently became an embarrassment. A manuscript note in the British Library copy reads, ‘This is the edition which the author was afterwards at such pains to suppress — the translations are totally excluded from the later editions’; and in later years Beattie ‘used to destroy all the copies that he could find, and only four pieces from the collection were allowed to accompany the “Minstrel”’ (A. H. Bullen, in DNB). The same sheets were reissued with a cancel title-page in 1761, when the Aberdeen origin was acknowledged.
It is offered here with a later collection, printing ‘all the verses of which I am willing to be considered as the author’: his autobiographical Minstrel (1771–4), three pieces repeated from Original Poems, and five other works (pp. 79–107).
