2l6 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



Enquiry into the Present State of Dramatique Poetry/ or of the 

 Unities briefly considered by Philomusus, of which they have 

 never heard and never will hear so much as the names ; we see 

 the country-gentlemen (sole cause of its surviving to our day) 

 who buy it as a book no gentleman s library can be complete 

 without ; we see the spendthrift heir, whose horses and hounds 

 and Pharaonic troops of friends, drowned in a Red Sea of claret, 

 bring it to the hammer, the tall octavo in tree-calf following the 

 ancestral oaks of the park. Such a volume is sacred to us. 

 But it must be the original foundling of the book-stall, the 

 engraved blazon of some extinct baronetcy within its cover, its 

 leaves enshrining memorial-flowers of some passion which the 

 churchyard smothered while the Stuarts were yet unkinged, 

 suggestive of the trail of laced ruffles, burnt here and there with 

 ashes from the pipe of some dozing poet, its binding worn and 

 weather-stained, that has felt the inquisitive finger, perhaps, of 

 Malone, or thrilled to the touch of Lamb, doubtful between 

 desire and the odd sixpence. When it comes to a question of 

 reprinting, we are more choice. The new duodecimo is bald 

 and bare, indeed, compared with its battered prototype that 

 could draw us with a single hair of association. 



It is not easy to divine the rule which has governed Mr. 

 Smith in making the selections for his series. A choice of old 

 authors should be a florilegium, and not a botanist s hortus 

 siccus, to which grasses are as important as the single shy 

 blossom of a summer. The old-maidenly genius of antiquarian- 

 ism seems to have presided over the editing of the * Library/ 

 We should be inclined to surmise that the works to be reprinted 

 had been commonly suggested by gentlemen with whom they 

 were especial favourites, or who were ambitious that their own 

 names should be signalised on the titlepages with the suffix of 

 EDITOR. The volumes already published are : Increase 

 Mather s Remarkable Providences; the poems of Drummond 

 of Hawthornden; the Visions of Piers Ploughman ; the works 

 in prose and verse of Sir Thomas Overbury ; the Hymns and 

 Songs and the Hallelujah of George Wither; the poems of 

 Southwell; Selden s Table-Talk; ; the Enchiridion of Quarles; 

 the dramatic works of Marston, Webster, and Lilly; Chapman s 

 translation of Homer; Lovelace, and four volumes of Early 

 English Poetry ! ; The volume of Mather is curious and enter 

 taining, and fit to stand on the same shelf with the Magnalia 

 of his book-suffocated son. Cunningham s comparatively re 

 cent edition, we should think., might satisfy for a long time to 



