Mr Edward Warner writes: On the 10th August 1637, Edward King, of Christ's College, Cambridge, drowned while crossing the Irish Sea. Lycidas first appeared in this memorial volume of 36 poems, the outpouring of the University's grief for the life of a promising and popular scholar cut short. W. R. Parker, Milton's biographer, observed that Milton's famous pastoral elegy 'has been called, and largely accepted as, the greatest touchstone of poetic appreciation in the English language, a masterpiece of scholarship wedded to art ... [and] one of the most profoundly original poems in the language'.
The book is the third most rare printing of Milton's poem, and the interest of the present exemplar is enhanced by a presentation inscription by the editor, John Alsop, a Fellow of Christ's College and Edward King's executor. It also contains three manuscript corrections to the text, including one to Lycidas. It was in the library of the American collector John Whipple Frothingham (181894), and then appeared in Bernard Quaritch's Catalogue 325, 1913, item 2559, priced at £450. It was bought by Quaritch again at the Paris auctioneers Tajan, 14 January 2009.
The Milton's Cottage Trust is most grateful to the Friends of the National Libraries for their generous financial help, and to Bernard Quaritch for offering the book to the Trust virtually at cost.