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observe, the title, as inserted in the Brit. Bib. has these remarkable words, " Newly printed with additions:" my copy has them not, and it exactly corresponds with that in the British Museum. I wonder that this circumstance has never been remarked before. The preface was added at the time when the 66 poem was newly printed," as well as the complimentary lines by Tho. Mychelborne, with another citation or two from Latin poems on the death of Sir Francis Drake. Mine has only one Latin piece, "In Dracum redivivum Carmen." It has also verses by Richard and Francis Rous, and three stanzas subscribed D. W.

ELLIOT. Ritson's Bibliographia Poetica gives merely the first part of the title with the date, 1596.

BOURNE. And it says nothing of the commendatory poems by Rous and Mychelborne: this looks as if he had never seen the book.

ELLIOT. The omission is not very important.

BOURNE. NO: these solicited panegyrics are seldom of much value. Chapman, whom I before quoted, is rather severe upon the poets, his contemporaries, who rarely gave the most trifling piece to the world without such scraps of preliminary praise it is introduced into his play of Byron's Conspiracie, Act. 3. (1608).

:

"Be circumspect, for to a credulous eye He comes inuisible, vail'd with flatterie ;

And flatterers looke like friends, as wolues like

dogges:

And as a glorious Poeme fronted well

With many a goodly herrald of his praise,
So farre from hate of praises to his face,

That he praies men to praise him, and they ride
Before with trumpets in their mouths, proclaiming
Life to the holy furie of his lines;"

and so on for about eight or ten lines further. I do not recollect any poem or play by Chapman, which has verses prefixed by friends" proclaiming life to his holy fury." It is in omitting such pieces before prose works that Ritson's compilation is principally defective.

MORTON. The labour of one man, however learned, was unequal to the task which was new at the time he undertook it.

ELLIOT. Are not these questions about complimentary verses and variety of editions silly points of controversy?

BOURNE. Sometimes they are necessary matters: a man with the true spirit of a lover of old books would think them the most inviting questions in the world: some have devoted their lives and labours to nothing else.

ELLIOT. But can you give any satisfactory reason why we should do so? If you cannot, let us return to Fitzgeffrey's poem.

MORTON. Recollect that you were the first to refer to Ritson, and to call him to task for an omission. ELLIOT. Then let me be the first to dismiss him, and all matters connected with dates and editions.

BOURNE. With all my heart; but before we close the British Bibliographer, let us read the preface to the edition T. P. employed in writing that article: at least one part of it is interesting. You will see that Fitzgeffrey calls the period at which he wrote "the golden age of poetry," though his testimony may not be so impartial as the judgment of critics of the present day, who can look with more equal eyes upon the rival reigns of Elizabeth and Anne. Read the preface the book is before you.

ELLIOT. I recollect two excellent lines in an old play, quoted in the critical selection by Mr. C. Lamb, perhaps not inapplicable to what you and others term "the golden age of poetry" in the reign of Elizabeth:

"Glories like glow-worms a-far-off shine bright, But look'd to near-have neither heat nor light."

BOURNE. They are by John Webster; but nobody has carried his scepticism upon the merits of our earlier poets so far as to say, that they have no heat and no light.

ELLIOT. Perhaps not; but I cannot be without suspicions that it will frequently turn out, as it did with some of the earliest English adventurers to North America-they brought home a great quantity

of micaceous earth, and found out to their dismay, in the words of the venerable proverb, "all is not gold that makes a golden show."

MORTON. It is not that you do not admire our old poets, but that you do not know as much of them now as you will by and by.

ELLIOT. I may

be converted into an admirer when my ignorance is lessened; only I am not a blind lover of a beauty I have never seen.

BOURNE, In this view, I doubt whether I have made altogether a very judicious choice of Fitzgeffrey's work as a sort of initiation: we must now take our chance, and let us begin with the preface.

MORTON. He says, "I deprecate the note of improvident, if not impudent audacitie, in that I who never slept in Parnassus with Hesiod; neither with the Satyrist ever liquorisht my chamfred lips with the pure christaline Aganippe, should take on me (especially in this golden age of poetry) to bring owles to Athens and swans to Thames, whose castalian bankes are embordered with more Muses then Helicon, more admirable conceited poets than the flourishing age of Augustus."

BOURNE. That is all that is to our purpose. You will see presently, when we come to read parts of his work, what an enthusiastic admirer he was of the poets of his own time—yet he "looked near upon their glories." I will not interrupt our progress more than a moment, while I show you a list of the

chief writers whom he has more or less applauded in his Affaniæ, or three books of Epigrams, and some Cenotaphs, published in 1601, five years after the poem before us: they are Sir P. Sidney, Edm. Spenser, Sam. Daniel, Mich. Drayton, Benj, Jonson, George Chapman, Joshua Sylvester, John Marston, Will. Percy, Tho. Nash, and several others. The names and works of some of these are sufficiently notorious.

ELLIOT. Of course nobody is ignorant of a few of them, and I have read Sir Philip Sidney's beautiful defence of poetry. Of some of the remainder I have only heard.

MORTON. Their names seem all pretty familiar to me, excepting one that caught my ear, I mean Will. Percy: who was he, and what did he write?

BOURNE. Ritson will answer the last question, but I do not know who will be able to answer the first. He published, in 1594, "Sonnets to the fairest Cælia," of which I have seen several in MS.; 'they were copied from a printed edition, long supposed to be unique, until another was by accident found on some stall in Holland, and brought into England. Of his family or history nothing has been collected, though I have reason to know that the industry of Sir Egerton Brydges has long been applied to the discovery.

MORTON. Does not Ellis, in his Specimens, say any thing regarding Percy?