WALLER, Edmund.
Poems, &c. written by Mr. Ed. Waller … and printed by a Copy of his own Hand-Writing. All the lyrick Poems in this Booke were set by Mr. Henry Lawes, Gent. of the Kings Chappell, and one of his Majesties private Musick. Printed and published according to Order.
London, Printed by I. N. for Hu. Mosley … 1645.
Small 8vo., pp. [8], 180, [4], 20; outer margins of first 4 ff. reinforced, browned at edges throughout, some staining and fraying, but a sound complete copy; in modern brown morocco; a few annotations identifying persons and parallels to Suckling (late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century).
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Poems, &c. written by Mr. Ed. Waller … and printed by a Copy of his own Hand-Writing. All the lyrick Poems in this Booke were set by Mr. Henry Lawes, Gent. of the Kings Chappell, and one of his Majesties private Musick. Printed and published according to Order.
Second (but first licensed) edition of Waller’s first and most important collection, published while he was in exile, and shortly preceded by an unlicensed volume, Workes (London, Thomas Walkley, 1645) (Wing W 495) – ‘an adulterate Copy, surreptitiously and illegally imprinted, to the derogation of the Author, and the abuse of the Buyer’ (prefatory ‘Advertisement to the Reader’).
Recent scholarship has shown the two other Mosley editions dated ‘1645’ (‘Printed by T.W. for Humphrey Mosley’) to be later reissues circa 1653 and 1660 respectively (Wing W 511 and W 512) of the Walkley edition, after Moseley had acquired Walkley’s rights and the remaining stock. The present edition, based on a good, albeit not (as claimed) autograph manuscript, provides the best text until 1664. It was ‘prepared at around the same time’ as Walkley’s piracy, ‘with Walkley’s appearing first … early enough for [Moseley] to plagiarize its small collection of speeches’ (Raylor).
Despite the reference on the title-page to Henry Lawes, there is no music in this edition and his settings do not survive (New Grove).
A later reader has copied out fragments of poetry in the margins (including lines by Suckling and Horace), identified the subjects of some of the poems, and added a full page of notes to the verso of the title-page.
Wing W 513; Timothy Raylor, ‘Moseley, Walkley, and the 1645 Editions of Waller’ in The Library, 7th Series, 2:3 (2001), 236-265.
