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First edition: it was followed by a bulky Commentary on the same in 1792. Pye’s motivation for the present translation was to increase access to the work throughout the English-speaking world: ‘Though England has produced many valuable editions of Aristotle’s Poetic, and many ingenious commentators on that inestimable work, yet they have all been confined to the learned languages; and while our neighbours on the continent abound in translations, it is almost entirely shut up from the mere English reader’ (Preface).
Pye (1745–1813) was a self-described ‘rhymer for life’ whose work on Aristotle was widely viewed as ‘original, shrewd, and learned’ (Oxford DNB). He was made poet laureate in 1790, though has unfortunately been the object of some derision from his peers; as his successor, Robert Southey, once famously quipped, ‘I have been rhyming as doggedly and dully as if my name had been Henry James Pye.’

Second edition (first 1768) of the collected odes of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, positively skewered by the Monthly Review as ‘a very bad and incorrect edition of the witty Knight’s lewd poems – The Publisher has, moreover, paid so little regard to decency in his selection, that he ought, by an order of the police, to be deprived of the use and comfort of breeches, during the remainder of his life.’ This kind of review, unfortunately, was not an anomaly for Williams: ‘Much of his poetry was judged obscene, even by his contemporaries, and his reputation has reflected that judgement … Influenced by Pope, whose early poetry especially he admired, Williams had neither the conciseness nor the subtlety of Pope’ (Oxford DNB).

‘Lovely Peggy’ serves as an excellent example of Williams’s extraordinary lack of poetic subtlety: ‘Were she array’d in rustic weed, / With her the bleating flocks I’d feed, / And pipe upon mine oaten reed, / To please my lovely Peggy’ (p. 118). Williams had a well-documented and particularly vicious case of syphilis, so it is probably safe to say that he did, indeed, enjoy piping on his oaten reed, though we will join reviewers in wishing he had kept his reed to himself. Jackson, p. 39.

A ‘new and enlarged’ edition of Samuel Rogers’s The Pleasures of Memory, the work for which he is (perhaps appropriately) best remembered for. Originally published anonymously in 1792, ‘the two-part poem, written in elegant but relaxed heroic couplets, begins with a nostalgic tour around the village of Rogers’s childhood, and moves through various scenes to explore and illustrate the “associating principle”, of the faculty of memory. It concludes with a poignant invocation to Rogers’s dead brother Thomas. The child of Mark Akenside’s The Pleasure of Imagination and the parent of Thomas Campbell’s The Pleasures of Hope, it entirely hit the taste of the day. The Monthly Review praised the poem’s “correctness of thought, delicacy of sentiment, variety of imagery, and harmony of versification” … and Byron (perhaps Rogers’s most notable admirer) commented in a letter to Thomas Moore of 5 September 1813: “His elegance is really wonderful—there is no such thing as a vulgar line in the book” … By 1806 it had gone through fifteen editions, two-thirds of them numbering from 1000 to 2000 copies each’ (Oxford DNB). Not in Jackson.

The third edition of vol. 1 (which had first appeared at Bristol in 1797) and the first edition of vol. 2, of this important collection gathering Southey’s early poetry, including ‘The Triumph of Woman’, ‘To Mary Wollstonecraft’, ‘Poems on the Slave Trade’, ‘The Genius of Africa’, ‘Botany Bay Eclogues’ and ‘A Ballad. Shewing how an old woman rode double, and who rode before her’, this latter based on a William of Malmesbury tale, and accompanied by a striking full-page woodcut (signed ‘M & W fecit’). Not in Jackson.

First edition, by an officer of the East India Company, Newcastle printed, with a view of the Cape of Good Hope wood engraved by Thomas Bewick. The subscribers are predominantly from the maritime towns of the North East. Tattersfield, Bewick, TB 2.154; not in Jackson.

First edition. Dedicated to the King, ‘Iberia’ and ‘War’ evoke sweeping images of patriotic victories on the battlefield, the banishment of tyrants, and, of course, effusive praise of Wellington: ‘Till Spain’s deliv’rer, glorious Wellington / Sun-like burst forth; arrayed in matchless light, / And Spain’s oppressors seek inglorious flight; / Napoleon’s cohorts flee the chief’s advance, / And seek a shelter back in shackled France … ‘ (p. 8). Jackson, p. 359. WorldCat lists 4 copies only (BL, Cambridge, McGill, Newcastle).

Rare first and only edition of a prize poem by journalist and literary critic Nicholas John Halpin, written while a student at Trinity College Dublin. Halpin (1790–1850) went on to publish several polemical pamphlets in support of the Church of Ireland in the 1820s, as well as several critical essays on Shakespeare and Spenser later in life (Oxford DNB). The present poem, dedicated to Charles Lennox, fourth Duke of Richmond and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, received universally excellent reviews, perhaps in part due to the subject matter. Jackson, p. 355. COPAC lists 2 copies only (BL, Cambridge), to which WorldCat adds 1 (Missouri).

First edition of this anonymous verse romance—a Scott-inspired medievalist episode set in the fourteenth-century moated castle in East Sussex. ‘An inoffensive grunter of the octo-syllabic sty’ (Monthly Review). Jackson, p. 430.

First edition. ‘an epic of the class of Southey’s Madoc and Landor’s Gebir... The subject is the Saxon invasion of Britain and the ‘bright city’ is Gloucester. ‘He was educated under Dr Burney at Greenwich, and subsequently at Eton College and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where his career was remarkably brilliant. He matriculated on 25 May 1810, and graduated BA (1814), MA (1816), and BD and DD (1849). In 1812 he won the Newdigate prize with an English poem on the ‘Apollo Belvidere’, which was considered by A. P. Stanley the most perfect of Oxford prize poems. Jackson, p. 437.

First edition. An original narrative poem by an important linguist and translator who had been the first to introduce adequate samples of ancient Scandinavian and Icelandic literature to English readers. Byron mentions him in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809):

‘Herbert shall wield Thor’s hammer, and sometimes
In gratitude thou'lt praise his rugged rhymes’. Jackson, p. 393.

First edition. Scottish antiquarian and Sharpe ‘lived in and for the past’ (Oxford DNB) and this early collection is steeped in Scottish occult lore and witchcraft (in which Sharpe was an acknowledged expert). Inspired by Scott, who became a lifetime friend and correspondent, the author spent a short spell at Oxford, but returned to Edinburgh in 1813, where he lived until his death in 1851. He left one of the most extensive collections of antiquities ever accumulated by a private individual in Scotland. Jackson, p. 310.

First edition, the second of two verse collections by a successful Edinburgh miniature and silhouette painter. Several poems are in Scots dialect and at least two are on artistic subjects: ‘Song, The Enamoured Painter’ and ‘Epistle to a Friend, on the Decay of Taste for the Fine Arts in Scotland, 1812’. This is a subscriber’s copy, one of two copies ordered by Archibald, twelfth Earl of Eglinton (restorer of Eglinton Castle). Painter Henry Raeburn is among the other subscribers. Not in Jackson.

First edition. Paterson was born in 1790, the son of a stone carver. He attended Edinburgh University before becoming Professor of English at Jena. He was ordained in 1837 and was a minister of the Free Church at Kirkud. ‘This Poem is written in direct imitation of the style of W. Scott: and as an imitation it must be allowed to have a very fair proportion of merit’ (The British Critic). Jackson, p. 381.

First edition of the posthumously collected poems and letters of William Isaac Roberts, a precocious young poet who died at the age of twenty in 1806. Despite his youth, he was evidently able to earn the respect of a number of important writers of the day, including Robert Southey, who helped prepare the present edition and wrote glowingly of Roberts in his correspondence to Neville White in March 1810: ‘I want your assistance in a business in which I am sure it will interest you to give it. A youth of Bristol, by name William Roberts, died of consumption about two years ago, at the age of nineteen … The family had known better days … and one calamity following another, has reduced them very greatly … William was a youth of great genius, and a few days before his death he bequeathed his poems in trust to his two intimate friends to be published for the benefit of his sister, that being all he had to bequeath, and his passionate desire (like that of Chatterton) was to provide for her … My hope is that such a sum may be raised as will be sufficient to place Eliza Roberts in a situation respectably to support herself and her parents. I do not yet know what extent the publication will run to, but as soon as this is settled, I will beg you to beg subscriptions … certainly he was a youth of great genius and most uncommon promise, which it is my firm belief, founded upon the purity of his life and principles and the rectitude of his feelings, that he would amply have fulfilled, if it had not pleased God to remove him so early from this sphere of existence’ (Keswick, 11 March 1810).

The young poet’s tragic fate clearly resonated with readers, as the length of the subscription list attests (pp. xxxiii–liii; among them Edward Jenner, Thomas De Quincey, and William Roscoe), and is rendered doubly (R/r)omantic when coupled with the volume’s description of how his young love and poetic muse died at a tender age as well: ‘An interesting young lady, into whose society he was introduced during an excursion that he made so early as the year 1803, appears to have awakened in his bosom such emotions of tenderness and affection as death only could extinguish. Her subsequent illness and decease, on which he so feelingly expiates in some of his letters, puts a melancholy termination to his fondly cherished hopes’ (p. xvii). Johnson, p. 767; not in Jackson.

First edition—Highland poetry inspired by the mountain landscape of Craig Phadrig, which is topped by an ancient Pictish hillfort. Carey muses on the legends of Macbeth (including the Weird Sisters), on the parallel between Macbeth and Napoleon Bonaparte), and Scottish history up to Culloden. Jackson, p. 348; Johnson, Provincial Poetry, 163; Aubin, p. 373.

First edition. Following The Borough in Crabbe’s output, these 21 Tales in verse are arguably his masterpiece and were warmly received by his admirers. ‘Several of Crabbe’s favourite themes are explored in multiple tales: exile and return, radicals and libertines as forces of social destruction, social inequality, and love and courtship’ (Oxford DNB).. Jackson, p. 364.

Sole edition of verse by a Liverpool poet, the son of actor Charles Lee Lewes. The poems are on contemporary patriotic themes (Nelson and Napoleon are frequent subjects) and some are in Irish and Scottish mode. Among the latter, the long poem Wallace (with notes) occupies the final 50 pages, and is the subject of the unsigned wood engraved frontispiece. Johnson 533; not in Jackson.

FIRST AND ONLY EDITION of a provincial poem in four cantos aiming ‘To reward virtue and discourage vice’ (p. x) through its portrayal of the steadfast Angela, who earns herself a life of domestic felicity by being ‘an example to the sex, that true virtue is able to surmount all obstacles’ (p. xx). A quick read this poem is not, but do not fear, for as the author states in his preface, ‘the dull passages, may, by their contrast, heighten, and serve as a sort of foil to the more interesting ones!’ (p. xii). The preface, like the poem itself, does a great deal of moralizing, including a section condemning suicide (‘How weak—how mad! When a few short years,--a very few days,--nay, even moments, might summon him into the Awful Presence by a messenger from on high!’, p. xiv) and another praising women, though he makes sure to temper his admiration by reminding women their place (‘To the policy of a state, the female sex is in no small degree indebted’, p. xvi).

We have been able to find only one other poem by the author, ‘The Angler’, listed in a July 1819 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, though we have been unable to locate any copies institutionally, in auction records, or on the market. Not in Jackson or Johnson.

First edition of this collection of verse by the young tutor to Edward Jenner’s children, which also contains journal extracts, together with addresses and verses on the benefits of vaccination. Worgan (1790-1809) was ‘a consumptive boy of precocious ability whom Jenner took into his household, nominally as a tutor to his sons.’ Jackson, p. 344.

First and only edition of a book of poems that the author ‘never would have published’ had it not been ‘in compliance with the wishes of many of his friends, relying on whose superior judgment, he launches his little volume, with all its defects, into the world; if it contributes any thing in a harmless way to the amusements of a winter’s evening, it is the extent of the author’s ambition, and the end for which any thing of his was originally composed’ (Preface). Included are several poems about Burns and a number of poems reflecting on the poet’s everyday life, including a ‘Song when the Author was Librarian to the Dalkeith Subscription Library’.