The original collection is contained in _The Character of a London Diurnal_ [prose] with several select _Poems_, London, 1647. This was reprinted in the same year and the next so often that some admit _thirteen_ different issues (of course, as was usual at the time, sometimes only 'stop-press' batches with slight changes made in what is practically the same edition), while no one I think has allowed less than _five_. There are substantive additions in several of these, but the singular characteristic of the whole, and indeed of Cleveland's published _Poems_ generally, is that part of the matter, even in the very earliest issue, is certainly not his: and that in very early forms these pieces were coolly headed 'Uncertain Authors'. The extent to which this jumbling and misattributing went on in the seventeenth century is generally if not very precisely known from the famous cases of _Sic Vita_ (_v. inf._, on Bishop King, &c.), and of the epitaph sometimes assigned to Browne, more usually to Jonson. Another almost equally strange, though perhaps not so commonly known, is the assignment of some of the poems of a writer of position like the dramatist James Shirley to Carew. But Cleveland must have been rather exceptionally careless of his work during his life, and he was treated with exceptional impudence (see Williamson's _Preface_) after his death. The process went on in 1651, to which two issues are assigned, with three or four pretty certainly spurious additions, while 1653 and 1654 each saw two more, the last being printed again in 1656 and 1657. This last was also the last printed in Cleveland's lifetime. But he was hardly dead when in 1659 two different issues, each of them many times reprinted, took the most astounding liberties with his name. The first foisted in more than thirty pieces by Robert Fletcher, the translator of Martial. The other, calling itself _Cleveland Revived_, contains the remarkable and perfectly frank explanation, given below, of the principles on which the work of Mr. Williamson was conducted, and the critical notions which directed his 'virtuous endeavours'. From the disaster of this singular fashion of building a poet's monument out of the fragments of other people's work, Cleveland may be said to have never been entirely relieved. For though twenty years later, in 1677 _Clievelandi Vindiciae_ (Preface and full title again subjoined) undertook the task and provided a sort of standard (which may, however, be over-valued), ten years later still, in 1687, the purged collection was reissued with all the spurious matter from previous ones heaped again on it, and this, with a fresh reissue (new title-paged and with a pasted-on finis[A]) in 1699, appear to be the commonest copies that occur.