ELIZABETHAN POETRY
HEADLEY, Henry, editor.
Select Beauties of ancient English Poetry …
London, Printed for T. Cadell … 1787.
2 vols., 8vo., with half-titles, list of subscribers, and errata leaf; engraved title vignettes; apart from a tear to top margin of a6-7 in volume I, a fine copy in contemporary speckled calf, gilt rolls to covers, spines gilt, slight worming to lower joint of vol. II.
First edition. This important miscellany – which would have been continued had not the young editor died in 1788 at the age of twenty-three – explores some of the byways of Elizabethan and early Stuart poetry. After a long introductory appreciation with biographical sketches of the poets, the verse is presented under headings such as Descriptive, Moral, Elegiac. The section of Sonnets – mainly by Daniel, Drayton, and Drummond – may have influenced Headley’s Oxford friend, William Bowles, a subscriber, who two years later was to publish his first collection of Romantic sonnets.
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Uncommon collected edition of Girolamo Parabosco’s (1524–1557) immensely popular letters to anonymous lovers, literary contemporaries, and a courtesan, with several letters written from a female point of view, this copy formerly in the possession of Tycho Brahe’s nephew and with several manuscript love poems.
PRESENTATION COPY FROM THE AUTHOR TO HIS WIFE SARGENT, John.
The Mine: a dramatic Poem.
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