Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 3.djvu/83

 10*8. III. JAX. 28, 1905.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

St. Mary Hall, Aug. 22, 1851.

Mr DEAR SIR,

On my return home for a little space before I proceed to the sea for the remainder of the vacation, I find your letter. You shall have an immediate answer, first assuring you that I have at all times much pleasure in giving you any assistance, and that I beg you will never hesitate to apply to me if you fancy I can do so.

The cancel in Wood 1 would send you if I had one, although I am now ashamed that such a bibliographical curiosity ever was allowed but I was then thirty-seven years younger than I am now, which is the only excuse (a very poor one, I allow) I have to offer. Wood states that Sir W. Raleigh "devirginated a maid of honour." I printed an indelicate story told by Aubrey on this subject, and, when six or twelve (I forget which) copies had been printed, took out the tale and replaced it with some lines by Sir Egerton Brydges, which stand in the

General impression. It was a premeditated cancel etween the printer, my old friend Joseph Harding, long since dead, and myself ; but you will do me a kindness not to notice it. There was a similar cancel in the account of Selden, both from Aubrey's MSS. in the Ashmole, a selection from which you must know, printed about 1812 or 1813, and which deserves to be referred to.

I have looked at my slips of paper touching Raleigh, and find the following :

Matriculated at Magdalen, Nov. 5. 1602 : " Gual- terus Rawleygh. Walceriensis, equitis filius an. nat. 16."

Matriculated at Corpus, Oct. 30, 1607: "Gualterus Ralegh. Dorcest. militis filius an. nat. 14.''

Matriculated at Exeter, Oct. 14, 1586 : " Georgius Rawlye. Devon, pleb. fil. an. 18."

Matriculated Alban Hall, May 4, 1582 : " Georgius Raleghe. Buckingamensis gen. fil. an. 12."

Matriculated at St. Mary Hall, Dec. 1, 1581: " Guiliellmus Ralegh."

'Britannia & Raleigh,' a dialogue in verse, c., Marvell's works, iii. 314.

Life of William I., by Ralegh, MS. Tanner, 103, 3b.

Letters from him, MSS. Tanner, 278 and 290. Poems by Sir W. R. among Rawlinson's MSS. When the University printed Raleigh's works, I looked at a portion of the miscellaneous works, and corrected them, without making any parade of the matter, from MSS. in Ashmole, Bodley, and the B. Mus. It was not desired to give various readings, but I took such as appeared to me the best from the various materials before me. I think I have met with one or two poems that I fancied at a subse- quent time 1 had not before seen, but of this I am very uncertain. You say you are going to press immediately if so I fear the offer of aid would be useless, but I shall be here for a week and will do anything I can.

In great haste

Very truly yours

PHILIP BLISS. J. P. Collier, Esq.

P.S. I have been told that there are many most valuable original letters by Raleigh in the State Paper Office, and once was shown some transcripts, but not allowed to have them, fearing I might print.

There had evidently been some corre- spondence on the subject, and Collier was

aware of one of the leaves containing the memoir of Ralegh in Bliss's edition of Wood's work having been cancelled, and another substituted for it ; the memoir in question- is included in vol. ii. (1815), and occupies pp. 235-49. The following lines appear in a foot-note at p. 239, in illustration of a passage in the text in which Ralegh is noted

as "out of favour [inter alia] for

devirginating a maid of honour " :

But in vain she did conjure him

To depart her presence so. Having a thousand tongues t' allure him, And but one to bid him go. When lips invite, And eyes delight,

And cheeks as fresh as rose in June Persuade delay, What boots to say, " Forego me now, come to me soon " ?

4 Poems,' by Brydges, 12mo, p. 50^

Bliss attributes them to Brydges, but this is certainty an error ; all he did was to edit 'The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh' (1814). The one from which the foregoing lines are quoted is headed ' Dulcina,' and consists of five ten-line verses, the one copied being the second. Hannah in his 'Courtly Poets' does not assign the poem to Ralegh for want of evidence.

The lines (hardly worthy of the place they occupy) simply acted as a stopgap, to replace " an indelicate story " that appeared on the cancelled leaf, and was transcribed from Aubrey's MS. in the Bodleian Library. To. this no allusion is made in the first edition of Aubrey's 'Lives of Eminent Men'; but the story finds a place in the second ('Brief Lives,' 1898, ii. 185), with necessary omissions. Xo conception can be formed of the gross character of the anecdote referred to except by perusal of the original MS., in which the author recorded all the gossiping stories of his period without attempting to exercise any discrimination in their selection or rejection, so that, as noted by one of his biographers, "his anecdotes require to be read with critical distrust." Except as a mere freak on the part of a young man (for Bliss was considerably under thirty years at the time), it is difficult to understand why he should have perpetrated " such a biblio- graphical curiosity " as a " premeditated cancel," not only in the memoir of Ralegh, but of that of Selden also, which latter is now unable to be identified. No copy of either cancelled leaf has been preserved as far as is now known. All the members of the Ralegh family mentioned in the letter are recorded in Foster's 'Alumni Oxon.' It is interesting to learn that Bliss edited some-