First edition, a wholly different work from Lucasta 1649, published by the poet’s brother Dudley Posthumus Lovelace, with ‘Elegies sacred to the Memory of the Author’ at the end.

‘Overshadowed by the famous songs, his other poems have received less attention than is properly their due’ (Wilkinson). Apart from another series of Lucasta poems, and poems built around such conceits as ‘The Ant’, ‘The Snayl’, ‘A Fly caught in a Cobweb’, and ‘The Toad and the Spyder’, there are occasional pieces addressed to Charles Cotton, Thomas Stanley (a kinsman), the painter Peter Lely, and ‘To Dr. F[ranicis] B[eale] on his Book of Chesse’ (‘The hidden Princes you unfold; / Court, Clergy, Commons by your Law control’d’).

There are editorial pencillings in this copy, we think for S. W. Singer’s edition (1817-18), in the section of ‘Translations’ (pp. 86-107), instructing the printer to omit the Latin (but not the French) verses that face the English here, and adapting the titles, which were to be preserved. A note on p. 105, ‘See separate MS leaf to follow here’, probably refers to ‘A Dialogue between Ordanus and Amoret’ which Singer, wrongly, added to Posthume Poems, not realising that it is by the poet’s brother, Francis.

Uncommon. ‘This little volume is now [1925] very rare, much more so than Lucasta, 1649 …. The sale of nineteen copies of Lucasta is recorded in Book Prices Current between 1887 and 1920. In the same period only four copies of Lucasta. Posthume Poems were sold’ (Wilkinson), and in the last forty years only two copies, one of them imperfect.

Wing L 3241; Hayward 98; Poems ed. C. H. Wilkinson, Oxford, 1925.

You may also be interested in...

FERRARI, Giovanni Francesco. 

Le rime burlesche, sopra varii, et piacevoli soggetti; indrizzate à diversi nobili signori. 

First edition, rare, of the only work published by Giovanni Francesco Ferrari, a Renaissance court poet of whom little is known.  Most information is gleaned, or will be gleaned in the future, from these verses; for example, his attachment to the entourage of the Mantuan prelate Ippolito Capilupi during his time in Rome is evidenced within the text, and multiples references to Roman life in the late Renaissance are to be found in these lines.  Ferrari also edited or endorsed a propaganda pamphlet written by Capilupi’s nephew about the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

Read more

KEATS, John.

Endymion. A Poetic Romance … with Engravings by John Buckland-Wright.

No. 200 of 500 copies (the first 100 specially bound in full vellum); also found in brown buckram rather than red as here. Buckland-Wright’s greatest work and one of the most important Golden Cockerel publications, it was begun in 1943 but not completed until late 1947.

Read more