2 Responses

  1. Mark Heumann

    The 1923 Nonesuch Press facsimile is described thus in the Publisher’s Advertisement:
    This edition is reprinted from the copy of the first (1681) edition, catalogued as C. 59 i .8 in the British Museum—a copy unique in that it contains pages 140 to 144, which were withdrawn for political reasons from the book as it was published. This copy shares with only one other the distinction of including pages 116 to 131, likewise omitted, and for the same reason, from the published volume. The Nonesuch edition is therefore closer to the original plan of the first edition than was that book, itself.
    The Horatian Ode was first published (though not first printed, as our original demonstrates) in 1776 in the edition which Captain Edward Thompson edited from MS. sources, which have since disappeared.
    The final poem in C. 59 i. 8 is left unfinished; it is here completed from Captain Thompson’s edition. The matter thus added begins at the top of page 145 and continues to the end of the poems.
    The form “s” has been substituted for [swash s] in our edition, but in other respects it faithfully follows the original even as regards misprints (for instance, “durst” for “dust” in the fourth line from the foot of page 19). It is curious that in the unique British Museum copy several misprints which appear in ordinary copies of the first edition are absent.
    It has been necessary to adhere to the reading ”glew” in the second line of page 20. “Dew” is now the accepted reading, and it has the equal authority of the sources from which Captain Thompson worked.

  2. Mark Heumann

    There is another copy (other than BM C. 59. i.8) in the Huntington; it is probably the copy mentioned by H. M. Margoliouth as, in 1920, in the possession of C. H. Wilkinson of Worcester College, Oxford. It is less complete than the BM copy, complete only through p. 139 (ending with the second of the “Two Songs”).
    More interesting is Bodleian Library MS Eng. poet. d. 49, which includes emendations and manuscript additions. This was published by Scolar Press in 1973.
    Captain Thompson’s 3-volume edition (1776) presents some difficulties, since, he admits, he had not received all manuscript materials before his project was mostly complete. The edition includes the Cromwell poems, including the full version of A Poem upon the Death of O. C. It is evident that the manuscript book that he traces to William Popple is the Bodleian Library MS.