[Footnote 1: Thomason copy of _Wit and Drollery_ in the British Museum, dated Jan. 18, 1655-6.--I failed to find a book with the title _The Sportive Wit_ in the Thomason Collection, and hence my hypothesis that there was but one book, with alternative titles. I am rather inclined to believe, however, that there were two, and have a vague recollection of having seen two books, one with one of the titles and the other with the other, advertised in a contemporary newspaper list of books on sale by the publisher Brooke. In Lowndes's Bibliog. Manual by Bohn, _sub voce_ "Wit," the two books are given as distinct; but then _Sportive Wit or the Muses' Merriment_ is there dated 1656, while there is no notice of an edition of _Wit and Drollery, Jovial Poems,_ till 1661. Though I leave the matter in doubt, some collector of Facetiac may know all about it. In any case, if _Wit and Drollery_ was not the identical book condemned, it is of interest to us as being one of Phillips's editing at the same moment.--Donne, who figures so strangely in _Wit and Drollery,_ had been dead twenty-five years, but was accessible in various editions and reprints of his Poems. The other three poets named in the title-page as the chief authors of the pieces--Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and Davenant--were still alive and publishing for themselves. Indeed the _Musarum Delitice, or Muses' Recreation,_ consisting of pieces by Mennes and Smith, had been published by Herringman only the year before (1655), and was in its second edition in 1658; and it may have been the success of this and Smith in it. Mennes, a stout book that led to Phillips's publication and to the use of the names of Mennes Royalist sea-captain, who had served with Prince Rupert, and was in exile at our present date, became Chief Comptroller of the Navy after the Restoration and lived to 1670. Smith was a Devonshire clergyman, of Royalist antecedents, who had complied with the existing powers and retained his living. After the Restoration he had promotion in the Church: and he died in 1667.]