PREFACE TO VOL. IV. THE completion of this fourth volume of RESTITUTA brings the work to a conclusion. The Editor at length ceases his labours, on the voluminous subject which furnishes its contents, without regret. Yet a proud consciousness of having contributed copious and important materials for the illustration of old English literature, more especially its poetry, sets him above the painful feeling of toil thrown away, or days idly spent. It is nothing to him if the superficial or the ignorant, the jester or the man of daily common-place knowledge, pushes aside in scorn pages so apparently uncouth, and values only the flimsy yet artful relation of some modern traveller, or the poignant malignity of some political lie, or some subtle and misleading criticism of the day! Such things are calculated to excite interest as short in its duration as it is intense in its degree. It is probable that the passion for the literary antiquities of our country may have been on the wane for the last year. It is casy to suggest a variety of causes for this; but some of them it would be difficult to hint at, without an infringement of delicacy. The promoters and leaders of this pursuit are a very small circle; and, as in greater States, Time serves but to bring into action the seeds of intrigue, jealousy, and division. A collector is not always a lover of literature for its own sake; and though it may gratify him to fan in some degree the first flame, it is not always desirable to see too broad a light thrown on the arcana! The present Editor has worked for no selfish ends: he has laboured for no collector; he has written to feed the vanity of no individual! His has been the honest ambition, not of engrossing, but of communicating, that of which, when he desired to know it, he himself had found a difficulty in attaining the knowledge! It cost Capel, Steevens, Malone, Reed, and Farmer, a long life to arrive at this kind of knowledge it gave the principal value to all their commentaries on Shakespeare: and then at last how much of it died with them! A catalogue of Mr. Heber's stupendous library, with a few notes from his capacious and unequalled mind, might do all that is wanted. But when will he have leisure for it? : Or is it to be expected that any thing so exquisite, so brilliant, and so unrivalled, should be laid open in broad glare to the unhallowed gaze of the multitude? The necessity of proving the uses of Bibliography is past. Those uses in the pursuit of solid as well as curious information have been fully explained, and are acknowledged. Numerous as are the sneers which the Editor has encountered in this study, they have fallen blunted on his irritable mind. He will not repent of the time that he has given to the older writers of his native tongue; nor of the expense as well as the fatigue that he has incurred in reviving many of them from the utter oblivion with which the lapse of ages had covered them. Among these are * On July 17, 1816, he has, in this spirit, ushered from the press of the Bensleys the three following curious little pieces : 1. Nympha Libethris: or, the Cotswold Muse. Barksdale, of Sudeley, in Gloucestershire, George Lord Chandos. First printed 1651. 40 copies. By Clement Chaplain to 12mo. only 2. Occasional Poems, by William Hammond, of St. Albans Court, in East Kent. First printed 1655. small 4to, only 61 copies. the rare poems of Clement Barksdale, William Hammond, George Wither, Thomas Stanley, and John Hall of Durham *—in addition to the Paradise of Dainty Devises, and England's Helicon and of prose-writers, several pieces of Robert Greene, Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Nash, Robert Southwell, Nicholas Breton, and Richard Brathwayte.+ Nor are these all: the Editor's private Press at Lee Priory has furnished many more; such as, Davison's Rhapsody; W. Browne's Poems (never before published ;) N. Breton's Longing, and his Melancholic Humours; Sir Walter Raleigh's Poems; Drayton's Nymphidia; Duchess of Newcastle's Poems; Brathwayte's Poems; Excerpta Tudoriana, (a collection of Elizabethan 3. George Wither's Hymns and Songs of the Church; with a Preface by the Editor. First printed 1623. small 8vo. 100 copies. These may at present be all had of Messrs. Longman, or Mr. Triphook; but not more than 16 of Barksdale's book are for sale, and not more than 30 of Hammond. Poems by John Hall, of Durham, do. Longman. All contained in the two volumes of Archaica, 4to. |