Privately owned in the USA

[no shelfmark]

Copy of the commentary, ‘Taken out of a MS of his late Majesty [? Charles I] Composed by Sr John Harrington Kt’, entitled ‘To φωs φισεωs or the light of Nature in Heathens, being breife notes upon the sixth booke of Virgils Aeneads’, on 103 pages, with a later title-page and index, the work dated 19 June 1604. c.1625-30s.

HrJ 19: Sir John Harington, Virgil's Aeneid. Book VI. (‘While thus with tears hee spake, his Navy glydes’)

Later owned by Professor Marcus Selden Goldman (1894-1984), of Urbana, Illinois, whose working papers are in the University of Illinois.

A verse translation in 134 eight-line stanzas, with seven supplementary prose essays on related topics: (1) ‘Of Enchauntements, and prophecies’. (2) ‘Of funerals’. (3) ‘Of hel and the state of the ded’. (4) ‘Of Paradise and the state of the godly’. (5) ‘Of the sowl of man and the original thereof’. (6) ‘Of the Citty and Empyre of Room’. And (7) ‘Of reeding poetry’.

Edited, as The Sixth Book of Virgil's Aeneid translated and commented on by Sir John Harington (1604), by Simon Cauchi (Oxford, 1991).

[Etherege letterbook (I)]

Copy of Etherege's letterbook, in a professional hand, including texts of c.230 letters by Etherege, written between 19/29 November 1685 and 1/11 March 1687/8, together with other contents of the original letterbook, 2 quarto volumes, c.350 pages (plus blanks, in contemporary boards covered with pages from a 16th-century printed book. c.1687-8.

EtG 150.3: Sir George Etherege, Letterbook(s)

Sotheby's, 20 July 1981, lot 8, to Pickering & Chatto. Then owned by John R.B. Brett-Smith (1917-2003), publisher and bookseller. Sotheby's, 27 May 2004 (Brett-Smith sale), lot 226, with facsimile of an opening on p. 138. Unsold and returned to Brett-Smith's executors.

Recorded in IELM, II.i (1987) as ‘L. 5’.

[Etherege letterbook (II)]

Copy of Etherege's letterbook, in at least two professional hands, including texts of c.230 letters by Etherege, written between 19/29 November 1685 and 1/11 March 1687/8, together with other contents of the original letterbook, c.225 folio pages in contemporary boards covered with pages from a 16th-century printed book overlaid with marbled paper. c.1687-8.

EtG 150.5: Sir George Etherege, Letterbook(s)

18th-century bookplate of Viscount Downe. Christie's, 4 November 1981, lot 99, to Pickering & Chatto. Then owned by John R.B. Brett-Smith (1917-2003), publisher and bookseller. Sotheby's, 27 May 2004 (Brett-Smith sale), lot 227, with a facsimile page on p. 139. Unsold and returned to Brett-Smith's executors.

Recorded in IELM, II.i (1987) as ‘L. 6’.

Mirour for Magistrates

Annotations in at least three hands, including those of Lady Anne Clifford and her secretary (and ‘cheif writer’) William Watkinson, written in the first person even when not in her own hand, with reference to the work's being read aloud to her, the spells of reading dated 21 March to 20 May 1670 and April-September 1673. 1671-73.

*CdA 16: Lady Anne Clifford, A Mirour for Magistrates (London, 1610-09)

Discussed, with various facsimile examples, in Stephen Orgel, ‘Marginal Maternity: Reading Lady Anne Clifford's A Mirror for Magistrates’, in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 267-89.

[Spenser MS]

Copy, in a professional hand, the tract dated ‘1596’, c.70 folio pages, the title on the wrapper subscribed ‘E. S.’ Early 17th century.

SpE 45: Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland

From the archives of the Trumbull family, later Earls of Downshire, of Easthampstead Park, Berkshire. Formerly Berkshire Record Office, Trumbull Add. MS 11(b). Sotheby's, 14 December 1989, lot 233.

First published in Sir James Ware, The Historie of Ireland (Dublin, 1633). Variorum, Prose Works (ed. Rudolf Gottfried), pp. 39-231.

Spenser's authorship of this ‘View’ is generally accepted, especially in light of the comparable views about Ireland in The Faerie Queene. A cautionary note about authorship is sounded, however, in Jean R. Brink, ‘Constructing the View of the Present State of Ireland’, Spenser Studies, 11 (1994), 203-28; in her ‘Appropriating the Author of The Faerie Queene: The Attribution of the View of the Present State of Ireland and A Brief Note of Ireland to Edmund Spenser’, in Soundings of Things Done: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of S.K. Heninger, Jr., ed. Peter E. Medine and Joseph Wittreich (Newark, Delaware, 1997), 93-136. See also, inter alia, Andrew Hadfield, ‘Certainties and Uncertainties: By Way of Response to Jean Brink’, Spenser Studies, 12 (1998), 197-202, and Jean R. Brink, ‘Spenser and the Irish Question: Reply to Andrew Hadfield’, Spenser Studies, 13 (1999), 265-6.