PRIOR, Matthew.
Poems on several Occasions.
London: Printed for Jacob Tonson … 1709.
8vo, pp. [2], xxiv, [4], 328, with an engraved frontispiece; A5, A7, F2, and U5 are cancels; a very good copy in contemporary panelled calf, spine gilt; inscription to title-page, ‘Jno: Poley de Boxted’, dated 1711.
First authorised edition, preceded by Curll’s pirated collection of 1707. In the preface Prior complains that in Curll’s edition poems by other authors have been misattributed to him and that some of his own poems are ‘transcribed … so imperfectly, that I hardly knew them to be mine’. He divides the poems here into four categories, ‘Public Panegyrics’, ‘Amorous Odes’, ‘Idle Tales’, and ‘Serious Reflections’, but ‘some of its most famous poems (Henry and Emma, An English Padlock, and Jinny the Just) do not easily fit into any one of these categories’ (ODNB).
Foxon, p. 641; Rothschild 1677.
