WITH A POEM BY DRYDEN
ROSCOMMON, Wentworth Dillon, Earl of.
An Essay on Translated Verse … London, Printed for Jacob Tonson … 1684.
London, Printed for Jacob Tonson … 1684
Small 4to., pp. [16], 24, with the medial blank (a)4; cut a bit close shaving the sidenotes on A3 and C3v, else a very good copy with the usual mistakes in the first sheet (A2 nus-signed A on the recto and A2 on the verso, page [7] mispaginated 23); new quarter morocco and marbled boards.
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An Essay on Translated Verse … London, Printed for Jacob Tonson … 1684.
First edition. Roscommon’s influential Essay, in heroic couplets, owes much to Boileau and to the author’s own education in France after the attainder of his kinsman the Earl of Strafford. Dryden, an intimate friend and himself the translator of Boileau’s Art of Poetry in the preceding year, contributes a long commendatory poem. Johnson was a later admirer and praised Roscommon as a critic who ‘improved taste’ and was ‘the only correct writer of verse before Addison’.
Macdonald 18a; Wing R 1930.
