The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920Various
General
The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920
Various
English literature -- Periodicals; London (England) -- Periodicals
Another interesting book that should soon, though there is no news of
its immediate arrival, be coming from the Clarendon Press is the third
volume of Mr. Saintsbury's _Caroline Poets_. The first two volumes
of this massive anthology opened up a whole province of literature
hitherto almost unknown to the general reader. In the last this great
work of excavation and exploration should be completed. With the
exception of Chamberlayne and the Matchless Orinda the Carolines of
Mr. Saintsbury's choice have been very obscure. In the last volume,
we understand, he intends to soar to the dizzy heights of eminence on
which Cleveland stands. A good critical edition of Cleveland will be
welcomed by all lovers of seventeenth-century literature. The early
editions of his works are a piratical sort of publication. Some of his
poems were, even in his own life-time, attributed to other writers,
notably his _Hermaphrodite_, which was fathered on Randolph, and which
he claimed as his own in an amusing little poem appended, later on,
to the stolen piece. And yet, in spite of Cleveland's claim to his
own property, Carew Hazlitt, in his reprint of Randolph, continues to
attribute the _Hermaphrodite_ to its wrongful owner. A very unnecessary
and supererogatory blunder.
* * * * *
While we are on the subject of the Caroline Poets we would like to
express a pious hope that some day, when we are all immensely rich,
the Clarendon Press, or some other great publishing institution, will
bring out a complete corpus of English poetry. More than a century has
elapsed since Chalmers issued his _English Poets_, and the book, in
spite of bad editing and very imperfect--indeed non-existent--critical
apparatus, is still an extremely useful one. It contains a complete
Gower, a complete Lydgate, a complete Hawes, and a complete Skelton.
The text of these older poets is indeed atrocious; but the fact remains
that they are there, reprinted and easily accessible in Chalmers's
stout volumes. For any study of the eighteenth century Chalmers is
invaluable; everything is in him, from the _Ruins of Rome_ to the
_Pleasures of Digestion_--or is it the _Art of Preserving Health_? A
well-edited Chalmers would be a work of immense value. And if the
Clarendon Press would go on, in the same edition, from the Carolines to
the Georgians and back, through the Elizabethans and Tudors as far as
the Brutians (the contemporaries of our first Trojan king), we should
be for ever grateful. But before that comes to pass we must all, as has
already been hinted, be immensely rich
* * * * *
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