PARNASSIUM (The)
: or Beauties of English Poetry. Selected from the Works of Blair, Philips, Young, Pope, Gray, Parnell … The whole forming a pleasing Collection. A new Edition.
London: Printed for W. Lane … [after 1776.]
12mo, pp. [2, general title-page], 81, [1], 47, [1], 8, 7, [1], 31, [1], 16, with an engraved frontispiece (partly detached); each part has a separate title-page with the imprint ‘London: Printed for J. James … 1761[–2]’; some occasional light foxing and browning, else in good condition, bound in worn contemporary sheep.
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: or Beauties of English Poetry. Selected from the Works of Blair, Philips, Young, Pope, Gray, Parnell … The whole forming a pleasing Collection. A new Edition.
A very scarce reissue by the enterprising William Lane, later of the Minerva Press, of A Collection of Modern Poems (London, J. James, 1762) – with a cancel title-page and a new frontispiece. The contents comprise the Love of Fame and The Last Day by Young, Gray’s Elegy, The Splendid Shilling by Philips, Blair’s The Grave and Parnell’s Hermit and Night Piece on Death, all of which may also have been available separately.
ESTC records four copies: British Library, Cambridge; Chicago, and Texas (that listed at Yale is of a single part only, and therefore not the Lane reissue). The suggested date of 1765? is impossible – Lane began bookselling in 1770 and publishing in 1773, and moved to the address given here in Leadenhall Street in c. 1776. The original publisher, J. James, of New Bond Street, is known from only a handful of publications, largely those included here.
