First edition; containing ‘all the Poems which have been written by the Right Honourable George Granville Lord Lansdown, very few of which have been ever before printed’. Granville (1666-1735) wrote his first play, The She-Gallants, at age 15, and his adaptation of Shakespeare, The Jew of Venice, was to hold the stage for forty years, but he had also been writing poetry on the model of Edmund Waller throughout the 1680s and 90s. Poems contains courtly verse addressed to a fictional lady, Myra, much admired at the time (though not by Johnson), as well as a piece ‘To my friend Mr Dryden, on his Excellent translations’, and a dramatic poem, ‘The British Enchanters’.

Foxon, p. 314; Rothschild 1051.

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