LITERARY "FIND"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 360, 17 May 1946, Page 9

LITERARY "FIND"

th Century English Manuscript Unearthed in Turnbull Library

AST week we printed an article by Professor Ian A. Gordon on the facilities for research in New Zealand, in which he spoke in general of some of the difficu! ties that obstruct original study. and make it necessary for graduates to go abroad to do fruitful work. In his own field, the study of English literature, Professor Gordon could have cited an exainple of his own experience which demonstrates both the pleasures and frustrations that attend discovery and

research for a New Zealander. When we heard of his discovery and identification in the Turnbull Library of a manuscript book of William Shenstone, the 18th Century English poet (author of The Schoolmistress), we had a photograph taken of its title-page and asked Professor Gordon to tell us the story of the book. The Leasowes Circle Shenstone is best known as the autho: of the Spenserian imitation The Schoolmistress, but was better known in his own time as the owner of an estate called The Leasowes, which he developed into one of the showplaces of England. With its ornamental urns, studied vistas, and cunningly-placed inscriptions by Shenstone, the place attracted manv friends-Percy (the collector of The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry), the poets Thomson, Jago, Graves, and Somerville, the printer Baskerville, Dodsley the publisher, and _ others Various of his works were published in his lifetime, and others after his death One publication he was known to have contemplated for some time was an anthology of unpublished verse collected mainly from the friends who made up the Leasowes circle. It was known that "according to Percy, Shenstone had a choice collection of poems preparing for the press at the time of his death" (1763). A letter from Shenstone to Jago in 1759 asked him for copies of verses by him and his friends, and said: "I have thoughts of amusing myself with the publication of a small Miscellany from neighbour Baskerville’s press. . . ." The volume was never printed, and if it had not been for Percy’s mention of it, its existence might have been forgotten altogether. Sent to New Zealand But the manuscript found its way to the Turnbull Library in Wellington, and a few years ago, before the rare books of the Turnbull Collection were sent away into the country for safe keeping, the Librarian (C. R. H. Taylor) showed the small leatherbound volume to Professor Gordon, who found it to be none other than the missing anthology. The eighty poems fall into four classes-first, about 40 poems of the Leasowes circle (Thomson, Percy, Somerville, Jago, Graves, Lady Luxborough); second, a group of ten ballads copied from "From the Old Collection of Ballads" (Percy’s famous manuscript from which the Reliques were derived); third, about 30 poems sent from various sources, poems sent by booksellers, and epitaphs; and fourth, a handful | of poems copied from already printed sources, Tea Table Miscellany, The Chronicle, and so on. At the end, there is an index in Shenstone’s hand, a short list of further poems to be added, and

in Percy’s hand a list of the Ballads in the Miscellany which were later published in the Reliques. Since he identified the manuscript Professor Gordon has been trying to work out its. ownership- not without difficulty. : Mysterious Erasure The volume is a small book of 300 pages, in a leather binding that is not the original one, into which Shenstone copied over 80 poems in his own hand. A few cuttings from contemporary periodicals are also pinned in with versions of poems. The title page (which we have reproduced) is done in black and red ink. > On the first fly leaf, in the hand of Percy, is this note: "This precious ( ) of my paor Friend Shenstone was thus piteously burnt in the fire wch. consumed my Library at Northumbd.

House in 1780. P.’. Then there is inserted a letter from a friend of Shenstone’s presenting the volume to Percy. The edges of the pages are badly charred, but the text escaped damage, almost entirely. The present binding was presumably put on after the fire. Alexander Turnbull got it from a bookseller who had a blanket commission to obtain for him the writings of Richard Graves. Before this bookseller had it, there is record of it in a Sotheby’s catalogue, and there is also a record of its being bought at a booksale in Bristol by a man called Drake. There is still a gap in the record of the book’s ownership, and there is still that missing word in Percy’s note, an erasure which mystifies the layman. But the manuscript itself is safe, and its discovery and identification here is a further contribution to the detailed study of minor 18th Century verse.