SOURCE: Lynch, Kathleen M. “Dryden and Tonson,” “Jacob's Ladder to Fame,” and “Eminent Publisher.” In Jacob Tonson, Kit-Cat Publisher, pp. 17-36; 67-94; 116-37. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971.

[In the following essays, Lynch examines Tonson's complex relationship with John Dryden; explores some of his ambitious publishing projects; and discusses his influence and the distinguished authors whose careers flourished after their association with him]

DRYDEN AND TONSON

For twenty years, until Dryden's death, Jacob Tonson was to remain the poet's publisher. Those who have made much of their quarrels might instead have reflected on the mutual respect and loyalty which preserved for so long a period the friendship of two such positive men. They held radically different views on issues of major importance to them both, yet their relationship, if at times acrimonious, was strong enough to endure divergences of aims and opinions on which many less solid alliances have foundered.

The publication of Troilus and Cressida opened the way for a method of collaboration between Dryden and Tonson which, although useful to Dryden, was especially so to the young publisher. It was Dryden who introduced Tonson to various “eminent hands” and to others who aspired to eminence, for whom, as for Dryden, Tonson was to publish during the ensuing years. At Will's Coffee-House Dryden met regularly men of wit and learning who were his admirers. Moreover, as Johnson was to remark, “His reputation … was such that his name was thought necessary to the success of every poetical or literary performance, and therefore he was engaged to contribute something, whatever it might be, to many publications.”¹

Dryden initiated his significant service to his new publisher with Ovid's Epistles, Translated by Several Hands, which Tonson published in 1680. The twenty-three epistles were translated by eighteen authors, including Dryden, Nahum Tate, Aphra Behn, Thomas Rymer, Elkanah Settle, and Thomas Otway. The anonymous versions of two epistles, Epistle 5, “Ariadne to Theseus,” and Epistle 19, “Dido to Aeneas,” a second translation of the text “by another hand,” have been attributed to John Somers, with whom Tonson must have been acquainted by this date. Dryden contributed Epistle 2, “Canace to Macareus,” and Epistle 18, “Dido to Aeneas,” and with John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, Epistle 13, “Helen to Paris.”

Dryden wrote the preface to this volume, in which, with his usual critical acumen, he appraised the genius of Ovid, especially the “prodigality” of his wit, and expressed the opinion that Ovid's Epistles are “his most perfect piece.” The translations, commented Dryden, represented in general a mean between a literal translation and imitation, a version in which the dress of the author might be varied but the substance was preserved. He explained that one of the contributors (Mrs. Behn) “who is of the Fair Sex, understood not Latine. But if she does not, I am afraid she has given us occasion to be asham'd who do.” And he paid his customary generous tribute to the “Excellencies” of his fellow translators which would make “ample Satisfaction for my Errours.”²

The Epistles proved to be so popular that Tonson published four more editions during Dryden's lifetime and three after his death.³ The 1681 edition included another version of “Oenone to Paris” by John Cooper, in compensation for Mrs. Behn's want of Latin, although her own version was retained.

Following the appearance of the first edition, another publisher, obviously trying to capitalize on its success, printed in the same year The Wits Paraphras'd, a burlesque of the Epistles. Tonson immediately responded with Alexander Radcliffe's Ovid Travestie, in which the paraphraser is advised to follow an employment “more agreeable with his Genius (if he have any) than that of Poetry.”⁴

In 1681 Jacob Tonson published with his brother Richard The Spanish Fryar, Dryden's most successful play. Excellently acted, The Spanish Fryar brought “vast Profit”⁵ to the Duke's Theatre. As a Protestant play, satirizing the lustful and greedy Friar Dominic, it had great popular appeal because of the current alarm over the alleged Popish Plot. A few years later, when James II was on the throne, he prohibited the acting of this play until after certain offensive passages had been removed in the second edition of 1686. Dryden himself at that date entertained very different religious sentiments from those he had previously expressed.

Immediate success greeted another 1681 publication, a fine folio edition of Dryden's satiric poem, Absalom and Achitophel, which had been written at the request of Charles II. Tonson published this volume alone. Narcissus Luttrell marked his copy as a gift from his friend Jacob Tonson, received on November 17, “An excellent poem agt ye Duke of Monmouth, Earl of Shaftesbury & that party & in vindication of the King and his friends.”⁶ The Earl of Shaftesbury, arrested for treason, had been committed in July to the Tower, where he remained for over four months; and the poem appeared anonymously about November 9, a few days before the Earl was brought before a grand jury and tried but acquitted. If the poem failed to prejudice the trial, its timeliness nevertheless procured it a most extraordinary sale. The first edition was sold in about a month, and six more editions were published in 1681 and the following year. Dr. Johnson said that his father, a bookseller, told him that the sale of the poem was so large that “he had not known it equalled but by Sacheverell's trial.”⁷ Tonson must have rejoiced in his profits, although his sympathy may have been limited for a king who did not respect his parliaments.

Dryden was confident enough of his powers as a satirist to believe that his poem could “force its own reception,” even with the King's enemies. “For there's a sweetness in good Verse, which Tickles even while it Hurts: And no man can be heartily angry with him, who pleases him against his will.” Dryden had the additional problem of not offending the sensibilities of the King. Since the conflict between the King (David) and his son Monmouth (Absalom), artfully instigated by Shaftesbury (Achitophel), had not been resolved, Dryden was unable, as well as unwilling, to give the poem a definite conclusion. Well aware of the King's affection for his wayward son, he “could not obtain from myself to shew Absalom unfortunate.” The reconciliation of Absalom and David might still come to pass. As for Achitophel, Dryden was not without hope “that the Devil himself may, at last, be sav'd.”⁸ The structural defect of the poem did not obscure the constellation of graces which inspired Johnson's fine tribute: “acrimony of censure, elegance of praise, art of delineation of characters, variety and vigour of sentiment, happy turns of language, and pleasing harmony of numbers.”⁹

Dryden had discovered that political satire was a happy medium for his poetical talents. After Shaftesbury had been released on bail, a medal was struck in his honor to celebrate his acquittal. Dryden's services were again required by the King, who suggested the plan for another satire, The Medall, and gave Dryden “a present of a hundred broadpieces for it.”¹⁰ The poem was published by Tonson in March, 1682. Prefixed to the satire was an “Epistle to the Whigs” in which Dryden ironically dedicated to that party a work which represented “your own Heroe. tis the Picture which you admire and prize so much in little.”¹¹ The vehemence of this second attack on Shaftesbury provoked a scurrilous attack on Dryden, The Medal of John Bayes (1682), attributed to Thomas Shadwell.

Tonson may have proposed¹²The Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel, which he published in the same year. This sequel was mainly the work of Nahum Tate, although Dryden contributed two hundred lines, including those demolishing Settle and Shadwell (Og and Doeg). Dryden reserved his full-length attack on Shadwell for MacFlecknoe, printed in an unauthorized text by D. Green.¹³ In 1684 Tonson published the authorized text in Miscellany Poems.

Tonson, like Dryden himself, was aware that brief occasional poems complimenting members of the royal family were always in demand. As poet laureate Dryden was expected to produce such pieces and did so frequently and easily. In the midst of larger projects, he found time to write his Prologue to the Duke and Prologue to the Duchess, which Tonson published in attractive folio editions. The former was spoken at a revival of Otway's Venice Preserved which James attended.

Also in that busy year of 1682 Tonson published Dryden's Religio Laici, which he reprinted the next year. Here Dryden turned aside from political issues to defend, but with reservations, the Anglican faith he was later to renounce. In collaboration with Nathaniel Lee, Dryden next produced a tragedy, The Duke of Guise, which was printed by Lee's publisher, Richard Bentley, and Tonson. This controversial play, licensed only after a delay of two months, was defended in The Vindication, published by Tonson alone, a prose tract in which Dryden denied having insinuated parallels between the entry of Guise into Paris and Monmouth's return to England against the King's command.

Meanwhile Dryden had become involved in an important venture, embarked on by Tonson, a translation of Plutarchs Lives from the Greek text. The lives were the work of forty-one scholars, chiefly Oxford and Cambridge men, selected by Tonson, no doubt in consultation with Dryden. Somers again chose to be anonymous in his life of “Alciabiades.”¹⁴ Dryden wrote “The Life of Plutarch” for Volume I (1683) and probably supplied for Tonson the note from “The Publisher to the Reader,” assuring readers that the translation added “a farther Lustre, even to Plutarch himself.” Dryden included a puff for Tonson, affirming, “Now as to the Bookseller's Part. … It is impossible, but a Book that comes into the World with so many circumstances of Dignity, usefulness, and esteem, must turn to account.”¹⁵ Tonson's gratification at the reception of Volume I encouraged him to proceed as rapidly as possible with the remaining volumes, as he indicated in a note “To the Reader,” signed by “Your Servant / J. Tonson,” in The Second Volume of Plutarchs Lives (1684). Volume III was published in the same year, Volume IV in 1685, and Volume V in 1686. Tonson printed later editions in 1702-1711 and 1716.

His duties as royal historiographer obliged Dryden to undertake, at the King's command, the translation of a long history by Louis Maimbourg, The History of the League, which Tonson published in 1684. The book was dedicated to the King and had a frontispiece representing Charles seated on his throne. The parallel between forces opposed to the monarchy in France and the enemies of the King's government in England could not be mistaken. In a letter to Tonson, Dryden commented that Tonson's report that “the History of the League is commended” had given him “great satisfaction.” Dryden added: “Take it all together, & I dare say without vanity 'tis the best translation of any history in English, though I cannot say 'tis the best History; but that is no fault of mine.”¹⁶

In spite of his services to his royal patron, Dryden's pension was in arrears, as the King's benefactions usually were. In need of money, Dryden welcomed, and may have suggested, Tonson's ambitious scheme for the publication of an annual miscellany of poems by talented writers, in which Dryden's own contributions would have a conspicuous place. Tonson did not originate but he did popularize this type of literary entertainment; and although his Miscellanies appeared irregularly and were less successful after Dryden's death, and although their method of publication led to the inclusion of some dross amongst the gold, they proved to be the best of their kind. Besides giving the reading public in a convenient form old and new works by well-known writers, the Miscellanies ‘“discovered” the gifts of younger men of letters and saved from oblivion some pieces which otherwise would have been lost.

Four volumes of Tonson's Miscellanies were published in Dryden's lifetime. They are often referred to as Dryden's Miscellanies, and indeed, according to the title page of the 1704 edition, the first four volumes were “Publish'd by Mr. Dryden.” But, as has been remarked, claiming Dryden as the publisher of these volumes was “something of a publisher's flourish.”¹⁷ Dryden apparently proposed certain appropriate selections for the Miscellanies and discussed with Tonson much of the material submitted. But Tonson advertised for all gentlemen who were interested to send their poems to him and assembled and arranged their contributions.

The first volume of the Miscellanies was published by Tonson without dedication or preface in 1684. It was entitled: Miscellany Poems, Containing a New Translation of Virgil's Eclogues, Ovid's Love Elegies, Odes of Horace, And Other Authors; With Several Original Poems by the Most Eminent Hands. The first one hundred pages of this volume were devoted to previously printed longer poems by Dryden: “MacFlecknoe” (Dryden's authorized text), “Absalom and Achitophel,” and “The Medall,” all published without Dryden's name. Interspersed among the other contributions are several of Dryden's translations: an elegy from Ovid's Amores, an idyll of Theocritus, and Virgil's fourth and ninth eclogues. A large number of Dryden's prologues and epilogues are included. Among other contributors were Thomas Creech, Sir Charles Sedley, Thomas Rymer, George Stepney, Nahum Tate, the Earl of Roscommon, Richard Duke, Thomas Otway, and Knightley Chetwood. Prominence is given to Virgil's very popular eclogues. From Dryden's astringent satires, with which the volume begins, the casual reader could proceed at his chosen pace to Virgil's “Last Eclogue,” sounding that note of nostalgia so much admired and so often sounded in pseudo-classical poetry:

Amongst the Vines the Willows and the Springs,
Phillis makes Garlands and Amintas sings.(18)

No sooner had the First Miscellany been published than Tonson and Dryden began planning a second. Dryden proposed including in this volume the Religio Laici, but he deferred to Tonson in excluding it in favor of new pieces, adding, however, the word of caution that “since we are to have nothing but new, I am resolved we will have nothing but good, whomever we disoblige.” Dryden promised to supply “four Odes of Horace, forty lines of Lucretius, the whole of Nisus and Eurialus, both in the fifth and the ninth of Virgil's Eneids; … there will be forty lines more of Virgil in another place, to answer those of Lucretius; I meane those very lines which Montaign has compar'd in those two poets; & Homer shall sleep on for me: I will not now meddle with him.”¹⁹

Sylvae: or, The Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies was published by Tonson in May, 1685. Dryden wrote a preface in which he confessed that he had recently been affected by “the disease (as I may call it) of Translation.” Although he had intended to translate only a few of the pastorals of Theocritus and odes of Horace, these efforts had spurred him on to renew his acquaintance with Lucretius and Virgil. After some remarks on the essential qualifications of a translator, he concluded: “I hope it will not be expected from me, that I shou'd say any thing of my fellow undertakers in this Miscellany. Some of them are too nearly related to me, to be commended without suspicion of partiality: Others I am sure need it not, and the rest I have not perus'd.”²⁰

Nearly a third of the contents of Sylvae was the work of Dryden. His contributions, published for the first time, were: three passages from Virgil's Aeneid; parts of Book I, II, III, IV, and V of Lucretius; three idylls of Theocritus; three odes and an epode of Horace; and two songs. Among anonymous contributions were a part of Virgil's “Fourth Georgic” and various offerings from Horace, Theocritus, and Ovid. Tonson himself contributed anonymously “On the Death of Mr. Oldham,” paying tribute to Dryden as mighty Pan:

He that now rules with undisputed sway,
Guide of our Pens, Crowned with eternal Bays.(21)

The alteration of the political scene with the death of Charles II in February, 1685, spelled ultimate disaster for Dryden. Temporarily, his circumstances improved. A month after the King's death, Tonson published Dryden's Threnodia Augustalis, a “funeral-pindarique” poem in memory of the King. A second edition followed in the same year. In paying sincere, if extravagant, tribute to a king whom he had served so faithfully, Dryden took pains to dilute the rhapsody of grief with an ardent eulogy of the King's brother, “a Monarch ripen'd for a Throne,”²² for whom he predicted a far brighter future than was to be James's fate.

Dryden's opera, Albion and Albanius, designed to celebrate Charles's triumph over the Whigs, had been rehearsed several times before the King and praised by him; but Charles died while it was being prepared for the stage. Revised by Dryden, the play was lavishly produced in June, 1685, and had run for six nights at Dorset Garden when a performance is said to have been interrupted by the news that Monmouth had landed in Dorset and was leading an invasion. Within a month Monmouth was captured; he was sent to the Tower and was executed on July 15. Although not acted again, the opera was published at the time of its short and expensive stage history. Dryden had some satisfaction in adding a postscript to his preface, in which he stated that the death of Charles had necessitated the addition of only twenty or thirty lines. The change to a new monarch had been made “without the least confusion or disturbance: And those very causes which seem'd to threaten us with troubles, conspir'd to produce our lasting Happiness.”²³

Dryden's longest poem, The Hind and the Panther, was written in defense of the new king's arbitrary and deeply resented policy of dispensing with the Test Act for the benefit of the Roman Catholics. Tonson published the poem in 1687. It attracted widespread attention, was promoted by James II, and was twice reprinted by Tonson before the end of the year. Shortly before James's accession, Dryden had been converted to the Roman Catholic religion. This was a genuine conversion, offering Dryden a solution to his need, which he had already expressed, for an “omniscient church”; but his enemies, as might have been expected, accused him of seeking to curry favor with a Roman Catholic king who had renewed his official appointments. In a short preface to the first edition, Dryden explained that he had made use of the conventional medium of the beast fable, which is “as old, to my knowledge, as the Times of Boccace and Chawcer on the one side, and as those of the Reformation on the other.”²⁴ He chose an argumentative milk-white Hind (the Roman Catholic Church) to defend her religion against an equally argumentative companion, a beautiful but spotted Panther (the Church of England).

As Dr. Johnson objected: “A fable which exhibits two beasts talking Theology appears at once full of absurdity.”²⁵ So thought two young men, Charles Montague and Matthew Prior, who lost no time in attacking Dryden's poem in a witty and very popular satire, The Hind and the Panther Transvers'd To the Story of The Country-Mouse and the City-Mouse, published by W. Davis. The anonymous poets inquired in their preface with assumed gravity:

Is it not as easie to imagine two Mice bilking Coachmen, and supping at the Devil; as to suppose a Hind entertaining the Panther at a Hermits Cell, discussing the greatest mysteries of Religion? … If it is absurd in Comedies to make a Peasant talk in the strain of a Hero, or a Country Wench use the language of the Court; how monstrous is it to make a Priest of a Hind, and Parson of a Panther? To bring 'em in disputing with all the Formalities and Terms of the School? Though as to the Arguments themselves, these, we confess, are suited to the Capacity of the Beasts, and if we would suppose a Hind expressing herself about these Matters, she would talk at that rate.²⁶

The legend has been denied that Dryden was reduced to tears by the levity of “two young fellows that I have always been very civil to.”²⁷ According to another legend, Lord Dorset, when presenting Montague to King William, said: “I have brought a Mouse to wait on your Majesty.” “I will make a man of him,” replied the King and settled £500 on Montague.²⁸ At any rate, Montague's political career seems to have been promoted by his share (probably less than Prior's) in the burlesque. Montague was to be created Baron Halifax and was appointed First Lord of the Treasury.

The birth of a son, James Francis Edward Stuart, to James II was very promptly welcomed by James's poet laureate in Britannia Rediviva, published by Tonson in June, 1688, twelve days after the birth of the Prince. Dryden summoned all of his eloquence to honor an event which served only to hasten the downfall of the misguided king. We may detect that Dryden sensed approaching disaster, even while he implored:

A Harvest ripening for another Reign,
Of which this Royal Babe may reap the Grain.(29)

Dryden's desire to serve his new religion and the King also found expression at this time in his translation of Dominique Bouhours's The Life of St. Francis Xavier, published by Tonson in 1688 and dedicated to Queen Mary.

In this same year, Tonson published his illustrated edition of Paradise Lost. We may suppose that it was at Tonson's request that Dryden supplied the epigram on Milton which was placed under the portrait of the poet in the frontispiece of this volume. Tonson's desire to create a larger reading public for Milton must have been shared by Dryden, who did not hesitate to rank Milton with Homer and Virgil. Dryden's lines were reprinted as “Upon Milton's Paradise Lost,” with Dryden's name attached, in Tonson's 1716 edition of his Miscellanies.

Before the infant Prince, for whom Dryden had in vain hoped a serene future, had reached the age of seven months, the bloodless Revolution of 1688 had been completed. William's invasion had been successful, James had abandoned his throne, and William and Mary had been accepted as joint monarchs. In consequence of these events, Dryden was deprived of his two official posts and lost whatever political influence he had possessed. He did not renounce the religion he had adopted, and he refused to support the new government in any way; but he never again engaged in political controversy. His Whig friends did not desert him. Dorset, acting as Lord Chamberlain, was obliged to remove Dryden from the laureateship, which he gave to Shadwell. Nevertheless, Dorset continued to befriend Dryden, who acknowledged, among Dorset's other favors, “a most bountiful Present, which, at that time, when I was most in want of it, came most seasonably and unexpectedly to my Relief.”³⁰ His now greatly restricted income compelled Dryden to return to the writing of plays and of more extensive translations of classical authors.

Financial difficulties may have led Dryden to choose another publisher, Joseph Hindmarsh, to publish his modified heroic play, Don Sebastian (1690). Hindmarsh probably offered him more money for the copyright than Tonson was willing to give; but a few months later, with Amphitryon, Dryden returned to Tonson, who was to remain his regular publisher. The purchase of the copyright of Amphitryon was apparently negotiated jointly by Jacob and Richard Tonson shortly before Richard's death, which occurred in September, 1690.³¹

The popularity of The Spanish Fryar may have induced the two brothers to engage in this final act of their intermittent partnership. Their business and domestic interests had been diverging. Jacob remained a bachelor. Richard had married in 1679 Mary Draper of Wandsworth, Surrey, by whom he had a daughter Elizabeth, born in 1680, and a son Jacob, born in 1682.³² Jacob junior, as he was called, was probably named for his uncle. He was educated for the publishing business and on reaching maturity was to become his uncle's invaluable partner. At Richard's death, his widow acquired his copyrights and took over his publishing business. Amphitryon appeared at the end of October, 1690, as “Printed for J. Tonson, at the Judge's Head in Chancery-lane near Fleet-street, and M. Tonson at Gray's-Inn-Gate in Gray's-Inn-Lane.” Jacob Tonson published the music of the songs separately.

Dryden's “Epistle Dedicatory” to Amphitryon reflects his anxious concern to retain the good will of those “who have been pleas'd to own me in this Ruin of my small Fortune; who, though they are of a contrary Opinion themselves, yet blame me not for adhering to a lost Cause; and judging for my self, what I cannot chuse but judge; so long as I am a patient Sufferer, and no disturber of the Government.”³³Amphitryon was popular on the stage and was reprinted by Jacob Tonson in 1694 and 1706.

At a time when party feeling produced the bitterest animosities, Tonson's loyalty to a great poet, who, however distinguished, was a proudly professed Tory and Jacobite, cannot be regarded as otherwise than generous, and so Dryden must have considered it. Founder of the most famous club of his day, the Whig Kit-Cat Club, and an uncommonly active supporter of “the immortal King William,” Tonson made allowance for a gulf between his political principles and Dryden's which could not possibly be bridged.

In 1691 Tonson published King Arthur, which Dryden originally intended to mark the triumph of Charles II over the difficulties which had beset his reign. In his “Epistle Dedicatory” to Lord Halifax, Dryden noted regretfully the changes which he had been obliged to make in his original design, in order “not to offend the present Times, nor a Government which has hitherto protected me.”³⁴ Tonson may have recommended the conciliatory dedication to Halifax and also the deletion from the first edition of a parenthetical passage that might have been embarrassing to a government which “by a particular Favour,” wrote Dryden, “wou'd have continued me what I was, if I could have comply'd with the Termes which were offered me.”³⁵ Dryden's “best patroness,” the Duchess of Monmouth, had persuaded Queen Mary to read the play, and the Queen had given it her royal approbation. In short, all steps had been taken to secure for the opera, aided by Purcell's music, a favorable reception. King Arthur was to be Dryden's most frequently revived play.

Dryden's interest in writing plays waned with Cleomenes (1692), completed by Thomas Shadwell, and a final tragicomedy, Love Triumphant (1694). Tonson had become Dryden's publisher too late to print the heroic plays at the height of their popularity, the masterpiece of All for Love, and several lighter plays where Dryden's wit burned brightest. But copyrights of the older plays were eventually obtained by Tonson. In 1695 he published a collected issue of current editions of Dryden's Works in four volumes.

Translation offered Dryden a better financial prospect than his now less popular heroic plays. He began the long labor of translating and editing Juvenal, a task which he interrupted briefly to write a panegyric in memory of the Countess of Abington, published by Tonson in 1692. The following year Tonson published in a folio edition The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis: Translated into English Verse … Together with the Satires of Aulus Persius Flaccus. Besides editing this volume, Dryden contributed the greater part of it: five satires of Juvenal; the six satires of Persius; and in the “Dedication” to Dorset, one of his liveliest and best essays, his “Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire.” Juvenal's other satires Dryden distributed among a number of cotranslators. He may have chosen to translate all of Persius himself because his assistants found Juvenal more congenial or less exacting.

That Tonson, “with mercantile ruggedness,”³⁶ made an exact count of Dryden's lines and paid him accordingly is evident from a letter he wrote to Dryden, probably in November, 1692, with reference to a new miscellany which was being prepared for publication. Tonson had agreed to pay the poet fifty guineas for a portion of Ovid's Metamorphoses to be included in the Third Miscellany and had actually made the payment. However, after receiving the translation, “wch I read with a great deal of pleasure, & think nothing can be more entertaining,”³⁷ Tonson counted the lines and considered himself cheated, for Dryden had submitted only 1,146 lines, and Tonson found that he was paying more in proportion than the sum (twenty guineas) which Dryden had asked for 556 lines from “a strange bookseller” (Peter Motteux), who had refused the offer. Tonson ended his letter with hopeful courtesy:

I own yt if you dont think fit to ad something more, I must submit: 'tis wholy at yor choice, for I left it intirely to you: but I believe you cannot imagine I expected soe little; for you were pleased to use me much kindlyer in Juvenall [2,280 lines] wch is not reckond soe easy to translate as Ovid. Sr, I humbly beg yor pardon for this long letter, & upon my word I had rather have yr good will than any mans alive; & whatever you are pleased to doe will alway acknowledge my self Sr Yor most obliged humble Servt, / J Tonson³⁸

Accepting the rebuke, Dryden produced enough additional lines to satisfy Tonson's sense of business rectitude but decided that in the future he would make contracts for his translations in advance.

In June, 1693, Tonson published Examen Poeticum: Being the Third Part of Miscellany Poems. In the “Dedication” for this Miscellany, Dryden attacked Rymer, recently appointed historiographer royal, who had written slightingly of Dryden in A Short View of Tragedy, published the previous year. Of the fifteen contributions of Dryden, ten were printed for the first time: the first book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and episodes from the ninth and thirteenth books; the last parting of Hector and Andromache from the sixth book of Homer's Iliad; and a few other pieces. The first ninety-eight pages were devoted to Dryden's selections from Ovid. Among other translations were passages from Homer and Horace by Congreve and from Ovid's Love Elegies by Henry Cromwell. Congreve and Prior were among the contributors of lyrics, and Addison, a student at Magdalen College, Oxford, contributed complimentary verses “To Mr. Dryden.” The volume ends with “A Poetical History of the French Disease” (syphilis), translated by Tate from the text of Frascatorius.

The Annual Miscellany For the Year 1694 was printed a year later. It was published with a frontispiece but without a preface. Dryden, who had already begun work on his translation of the whole of Virgil, contributed only the third book of Virgil's Georgics and “To Sir G. Kneller.” Addison contributed a translation of nearly all of the “Fourth Georgic,” an episode from Ovid, “A Song for St. Cecilia's Day,” and “An Account of the Greatest English Poets.” Congreve and Prior were again represented, as well as less distinguished writers.

Dryden's work on Virgil was now sufficiently advanced for arrangements to be made for publishing the volume. On June 15, 1694, Dryden and Tonson signed a legal contract for a subscription edition, Congreve acting as a witness. Dryden agreed to translate Virgil's Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid “with all convenient speed,” meanwhile engaging in only a few minor literary labors. Tonson was to pay Dryden in installments: £50 for the Eclogues and Georgics; £50 when the first four books of the Aeneid were completed; £50 at the end of the eighth book; and £50 at the end of the twelfth. Tonson was to provide one hundred plates, previously used in Ogilby's Virgil, and was to solicit one hundred subscribers, at five guineas each, three guineas to be paid in advance and two on delivery of the book, and was to supply at his charge the titles and coats of arms of the subscribers. Dryden was to receive any subscription payment in excess of five guineas and might order as many books as he wished, paying the difference between the price of the large paper for subscribers and the common paper. When the sixth book of the Aeneid had been finished, Dryden was to give notice that only those who subscribed to the volume could have the large paper.³⁹

The terms of payment for the subscribers to the second printing were subsequently arranged between Dryden and Tonson. The price paid was to be two guineas, of which one guinea was to be paid to Francis Atterbury, who was to collect for Dryden at the time of subscription, and the second guinea to Tonson on receipt of the book. The books for these subscribers were to have as fine paper, print, and engravings as those for the first subscribers, but were not to include the coats of arms.⁴⁰ Dryden's profits for the translation, which have been variously estimated, were probably about £1,400.⁴¹

The letters of Dryden to Tonson, while the monumental task was progressing, reveal the intermittent turbulence which affected their relations at that time. Dryden was old, in failing health, by preference indolent, and resentful of pressure to get on with his work. Moreover, he was irked by having his gifts always shrewdly estimated as a business proposition. In one letter he wrote that it was “high time” to conclude the agreement for the second subscriptions, and this must be done at once. The bargain made between them, Dryden noted, was “much to my loss,” although his only regret now was that Tonson might lose his profit “by your too good opinion of my Abilities.” Congreve would meet with them (to witness the second agreement) “as a Common friend; for as you know him for yours, I make not the least doubt, but he is much more mine.”⁴² Dryden reminded Tonson that the payment for the four middle books of the Aeneid must be made in “good silver,” not in the coins in current circulation but of inferior value which he had been receiving. Author and publisher argued over Dryden's share in the second subscriptions. Dryden had told Congreve “that I knew you too well to believe you meant me any kindness, & he promised me to believe accordingly of you, if you did not. But this is past, & you shall have your bargain if I live, and have my health.”⁴³

In another letter Dryden wrote to Tonson of a fresh grievance, the publisher's refusal to pay any additional sum for the notes which Dryden was to supply; yet making them short would save half a year's labor. “Upon triall,” declared Dryden, “I find all of your trade are Sharpers & you not more than others; therefore I have not wholly left you”; and he signed this letter: “not your Enemy, & may be your friend / John Dryden.”⁴⁴ At a later date, Dryden admitted: “What I wrote yesterday was too sharp; but I doubt it is all true. Your Boys comeing upon so unseasonable a visit, as if you were frighted for your self, discomposed me.”⁴⁵

Legends of the feuds between Dryden and Tonson were current in their day and persisted long after their deaths. Undoubtedly exaggerated, they nonetheless reflect something of the quick tempers and acid wit of the two men. Dr. Johnson reported that Lord Bolingbroke told Dr. William King of Oxford that one day in his youth, when he visited Dryden and was talking with him, they heard another person enter the house. “This,” said Dryden, “is Tonson. You will take care not to depart before he goes away; for I have not completed the sheet which I promised him; and if you leave me unprotected, I must suffer all the rudeness to which his resentment can prompt his tongue.”⁴⁶ Edmund Malone in his account of Dryden's life relates an anecdote of one skirmish between author and publisher from which the poet emerged triumphant. Once, when Tonson refused to advance Dryden a certain sum of money, Dryden sent a second messenger with a satirical triplet, adding, “Tell the dog, that he who wrote these lines, can write more.” The verses “had the desired effect.” As later incorporated in William Shippen's satire, Faction Display'd (1704), these were the lines in which angry Dryden painted Jacob's portrait:

With leering Looks, Bullfac'd and Freckled fair,
With two left Legs, and Judas-coloured Hair,
With Frowzy Pores, that taint the ambient Air.(47)

Yet the tone of Dryden's letters to Tonson is, on the whole, friendly. He had occasion to thank Tonson for gifts of melons and sherry, for collecting his Northamptonshire rents, for the pleasure of his company in the country, for advancing money for two watches to be sent to his sons in Italy, and for forwarding letters (which did not always reach them) to his sons. In one of his more relaxed moods, Dryden expressed to Tonson the hope that he would never lose Congreve's affection, “Nor yours Sir; as being Your most Faithful & much obligd Servant / John Dryden.”⁴⁸ Sir Walter Scott judiciously appraised the long relationship: “But whatever occasional subjects of dissention arose between Dryden and his bookseller, mutual interest, the strongest of ties, appears always to have brought them together, after the first ebullition of displeasure had subsided.”⁴⁹

Dryden chose his long-time publisher to launch The Husband His Own Cuckold (1696), a comedy which John Dryden, Jr., had composed in Italy. The proud father took time off from his work on Virgil to write a preface and epilogue for his son's play. The preface concludes with Dryden's disarming defense of the young writer: “Farewell, Reader, if you are a Father you will forgive me, if not, you will when you are a father.”⁵⁰

Dryden's friends gave him all possible assistance in his burdensome project as the translator of Virgil. Gilbert Dolben loaned him editions of Virgil in Latin and commentaries on them. Knightley Chetwood contributed a “Life of Virgil” and the preface to the “Pastorals,” and Addison wrote the preface to the “Georgics” and the prose synopses for the twelve books of the “Aeneis.” To that “Excellent Young Man,” Congreve, Dryden was indebted for comparing Dryden's version of the “Aeneis” with the original and showing Dryden many faults which he endeavored to correct.⁵¹ The scope of his immense task Dryden found disheartening “in the wretched remainder of a sickly Age, worn out with Study, and oppress'd by Fortune.”⁵² On the major portion of the translation, the “Aeneis,” to which Virgil had devoted eleven years, Dryden spent only three. Although he longed for more time to correct his errors, “some of my Subscribers grew so clamorous, that I cou'd no longer deferr the Publication.”⁵³ At last, in August, 1697, Tonson published The Works of Virgil. Dryden dedicated the three divisions of his book to Lord Clifford, to the Earl of Chesterfield, and to the Marquis of Normanby, including in the third dedication a leisurely essay on epic poetry.

Dryden wrote to his sons that Tonson “missed of his design in the Dedication: though He had prepared the Book for it; for in every figure of Aeneas, he has caused him to be drawn like K. William, with a hooked Nose.”⁵⁴ Tonson had obviously urged Dryden to dedicate his translation to the King, but Dryden had resisted such a concession to the Whigs. Tonson had been obliged to content himself with his publisher's prerogative: giving Virgil's hero, in slightly altered plates which were Tonson's own property, a nose unmistakably like the King's.

Alexander's Feast: or The Power of Musique, Dryden's second ode in honor of St. Cecilia's Day, was first presented, with great success, with music by Jeremiah Clarke, at Stationers' Hall in November, 1697. Tonson published the poem in December. Dryden directed Tonson to correct what seems to have been the poet's “small mistake,” the writing of “Lais” for “Thais” in a copy which the author had submitted to the publisher.⁵⁵ Gratified by the reception of his ode, Dryden wrote to Tonson: “I am glad to hear from all Hands that my Ode is esteemed the best of all my poetry, by all the Town: I thought so my self when I writ it but being old, I mistrusted my own Judgment. I hope it has done you service, and will do more.”⁵⁶ The popularity of the poem was enhanced by Handel's music in 1736, and ten editions appeared in a period of twenty years.

Dryden's last work, his Fables, Ancient and Modern, was published by Tonson in March, 1700, less than two months before Dryden's death. The Fables consists of nineteen paraphrases or translations, and three of Dryden's original poems, including a reprint of Alexander's Feast, with the Middle English text of Chaucer's poems in an appendix. The longest selections were from Chaucer and Ovid.⁵⁷ The three tales from Boccaccio, whom Dryden considered inferior to Chaucer, seem to have been intended as fillers. It was a satisfaction to Dryden to offer his readers his translation of Book I of Homer's Iliad, for he found Homer's fire more congenial than Virgil's sedateness; and if he lived long enough and had “moderate health,” he proposed to translate all of Homer.

The delightful preface to the Fables shows no diminution of Dryden's powers, nor did he feel any. “What Judgment I had,” wrote Dryden, “increases rather than diminishes; and Thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only Difficulty is to chuse or to reject; to run them into Verse, or to give them the other Harmony of Prose.”⁵⁸ With his usual perceptiveness, he discusses the four authors—Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer—whom he has freely paraphrased.

Dryden's modernization in the Fables of some of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was an experiment, now regarded as unfortunate, which he defended on the score that the greater part of his countrymen could not understand the original text, and his only desire was to “perpetuate” or at least “refresh” Chaucer's memory. The paraphrases were obviously undertaken con amore. Dryden's heartfelt praise of Chaucer gives the modern reader more pleasure than Dryden's paraphrases and remains one of the finest pieces of Chaucerian criticism. To Dryden, Chaucer “is a perpetual fountain of good sense.”

Chaucer follow'd Nature every where; but was never so bold to go beyond her. … He must have been a Man of a most wonderful comprehensive Nature, because, as it has been truly observ'd of him, he has taken into the Compass of his Canterbury Tales the various Manners and Humours (as we now call them) of the whole English Nation, in his Age. Not a single Character has escap'd him. … There is such a Variety of Game springing up before me, that I am distracted in my Choice, and know not which to follow. 'Tis sufficient to say according to the Proverb, that here is God's Plenty. We have our Forefathers and Great Grand-dames all before us, as they were in Chaucer's Days; their general Characters are still remaining in Mankind, and even in England, though they are call'd by other Names than those of Moncks, and Fryars, and Chanons, and Lady Abbesses, and Nuns: for Mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of Nature, though every thing is alter'd.⁵⁹

It has been suggested that because of “miscellaneousness”⁶⁰ the Fables did not prove popular enough for a second edition to be required before 1713. Tonson paid Dryden three hundred guineas for 10,000 lines, and Dryden's estate received an additional payment when the second edition was printed.⁶¹

Dryden died on May 1, 1700. The year after his death, Tonson, with Thomas Bennet and Richard Wellington, who held some of the copyrights, published a large folio edition in two volumes of The Comedies, Tragedies, and Operas written by John Dryden, Esq. Now first collected, and corrected from the originals. The publication was hastened as much as possible in accordance with Tonson's firm conviction that a famous man's works should be reprinted as soon as possible after his death. Kneller's fine portrait of Dryden, which Tonson owned,⁶² was engraved as a frontispiece for the first volume of the plays. In Poetical Miscellanies: The Fifth Part (1704) Tonson printed ten pieces by Dryden not previously published, including two excerpts from Ovid's The Art of Love; and he printed in an edition of The Art of Love (1709) all of Dryden's translation of Book I.⁶³ When he reprinted The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher (1711) Tonson took pains to have inserted in the preface “just as he left them,”⁶⁴ the notes Dryden had written on blank leaves in his copy of Rymer's The Tragedies of the Last Age. In fairness to Tonson, it must be borne in mind that although the pecuniary advantages of these professional attentions to Dryden's memory weighed heavily with him, Tonson wished also the involvement in shading the great poet's laurels which friendship dictated. We have the testimony of Lockier that Tonson had “a good key” to Buckingham's popular satire on Dryden, The Rehearsal, “but refused to publish it because he had been so much obliged to Dryden.”⁶⁵

Seventeen years after Dryden's death, Tonson published in six volumes The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq., edited, with a critical preface, by their mutual friend, William Congreve, who thus fulfilled Dryden's request to “be kind to my Remains.”⁶⁶ With quiet eloquence, Congreve paid homage to Dryden which has endeared both Dryden and Congreve to generations of Dryden's admirers. “He was of a Nature,” wrote Congreve, “exceedingly Humane and Compassionate; easily forgiving Injuries, and capable of a prompt and sincere Reconciliation with them who had offended him. … To the best of my Knowledge and Observation, he was, of all the Men that ever I knew, one of the most Modest.”⁶⁷ Congreve's preface might well have impressed Tonson, as it subsequently did Samuel Johnson, as a tribute to Dryden to which “nothing can be objected but the fondness of friendship; and to have excited that fondness in such a mind is no small degree of praise.”⁶⁸

No such perfection of friendship existed between Dryden and Tonson. Their relationship was frequently marred by friction. Nevertheless, they were indispensable to each other. The aging poet, harassed by ill health, political disfavor, and poverty, required his loyal publisher's spur to unrelaxing literary exertion. Tonson needed the prestige of publishing for “Mr. Dryden” and the guidance of a man who was singularly qualified for that service.

.....

JACOB'S LADDER TO FAME

Tonson had a gift for appraising the talents of budding authors. Moreover, he had surrounded himself with a group of excellent advisers. A youthful poet, Alexander Pope, was naturally elated when he received a letter from Tonson expressing an interest in his earliest literary achievement, his “Pastorals.” On April 20, 1706, Tonson wrote to Pope:

Sr,

I have lately seen a pastoral of yours in mr Walsh & mr Congreves hands, which is extreamely ffine & is generally approv'd off by the best Judges in poetry.⁶⁹ I Remember I have formerly seen you at my Shop & am Sorry I did not Improve my Acquaintance with you. If you design your Poem for the Press no person shall be more Carefull in the printing of it, nor no one can give a greater Incouragemt to it; than Sr yor Most Obedient / Humble Servant / Jacob Tonson Pray give me a line pr Post.⁷⁰

The flattering inquiry led to the publication of the “Pastorals,” together with Pope's paraphrase of Chaucer's “Merchant's Tale” as “January and May” and the “Episode of Sarpedon” from Homer's Iliad, in Poetical Miscellanies: The Sixth Part (1709). Pope received a total of thirteen guineas for these contributions.⁷¹

Wycherley, whom Pope was assisting with a revision of his poems, perceived that his young friend had taken an important step in the right direction. He assured Pope: “I approve of your making Tonson your Muse's Introductor into the World, or Master of the Ceremonies, who has been so long a Pimp, or Gentleman-Usher to the Muses.”⁷² As for Pope, he could not conceal his satisfaction that “beyond all my Expectations, & far above my Demerits,” he had been “most mercifully repriev'd by the Sovereign Power of Jacob Tonson” from the hands of “those barbarous Executioners of the Muses,” the critics.⁷³

When the Sixth Miscellany came out, Wycherley was able to report to the young poet that “nothing has lately been better received by the Publick than your part of it.”⁷⁴ With a becoming, if affected, modesty, Pope replied:

This modern Custom of appearing in Miscellanies, is very useful to the Poets, who, like other Thieves, escape by getting into a Crowd, and herd together like Banditti, safe only in their multitude. … I can be content with a bare saving game, without being thought an Eminent hand (with which title Jacob has graciously dignify'd his Adventurers and voluntiers in Poetry.) Jacob creates Poets, as Kings sometimes do Knights, not for their honour, but for money. Certainly he ought to be esteem'd a worker of Miracles, who is grown rich by Poetry.⁷⁵

The offensive implication of “a bare saving game” brought a vigorous protest from Wycherley: “The Salt of your Wit has been enough to give a relish to the whole insipid Hotch-Potch it is mingled with; and you will make Jacob's Ladder raise you to Immortality.”⁷⁶

It was Bernard Lintot, rather than Tonson, who published most of Pope's poems. The change of publisher may have been due to the fact that Tonson and Pope were too well matched in the art of driving shrewd bargains. Pope did contribute a paraphrase of Chaucer's “Wife of Bath's Prologue” to Steele's Poetical Miscellanies (1714) and the episode of “Dryope” to Garth's edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, both published by Tonson. Jacob junior, Tonson's nephew, published Pope's The Works of Shakespear (1723-1725), no doubt because he held most of the copyright for Shakespeare's works. The relations between Pope and Jacob junior became tinged with acrimony, and their differences had not been settled at the latter's death. The younger publisher offended Pope by publishing, with others, Lewis Theobald's rival edition of The Works of Shakespeare (1733), and he may have refused to resign his rights to certain poems for a collected edition of Pope's works.

Tonson began publishing for William Congreve in 1693; and unlike Pope, Congreve never transferred his allegiance to another publisher. The swiftness of Congreve's rise to the top of Jacob's ladder must have been a source of extraordinary pleasure to the publisher, and Congreve's abandonment of his dramatic career in 1700 at the age of thirty must have been deplored by Jacob quite as much as by Congreve's other friends. Congreve continued to be regarded by Tonson, as well as by Pope, as “Ultimus Romanorum”⁷⁷ and provided a yardstick by which Tonson measured other contemporary dramatists and found them wanting.

Congreve contributed to Charles Gildon's Miscellany Poems upon Several Occasions (1692), published by Peter Buck, five pieces: two paraphrases of odes by Horace; “Upon a Lady's Singing, Pindarick Ode”; and two short lyrics. Buck also published Congreve's first play, The Old Batchelour (1693), to which Dryden, much impressed by its merits, had added some finishing touches. It is probable that Dryden introduced Congreve to Tonson; and Dryden and Tonson lost no time in enlisting Congreve's services for Tonson's Third Miscellany. In this volume reappeared in a slightly revised version Congreve's “Upon a Lady's Singing,” now entitled “On Mrs. Arabella Hunt Singing”; Congreve's paraphrase of Horace's “Ode 9, Book I,” both already published in Gildon's Miscellany Poems; and in addition Congreve's paraphrases of two other odes by Horace and his translation of “Laments” for Hector from Homer's Iliad.

In his Dedication for the Third Miscellany, Dryden publicly attached to Congreve's translation from Homer the seal of generous, unqualified approval. Dryden professed himself unable to mention Congreve “without the Honour which is due to his Excellent Parts, and that entire Affection which I bear him.” He was convinced that “my Friend has added to the Tenderness which he found in the Original; and without Flattery, surpass'd his Author”; and he wished Congreve had the leisure to translate all of Homer “and the World the good Nature and Justice to encourage him in that noble Design of which he is more capable than any Man I know.”⁷⁸ To what more valuable introduction to the literary world than this could any young writer aspire?

Congreve was invited to translate one of Juvenal's satires, the “Eleventh,” for Dryden's impressive translation of Juvenal and Persius. To the satires of the latter were prefixed congratulatory verses in which Congreve praised Dryden as “Thou great Revealer of dark Poesie” and “Apollo's darling Priest.” In language more felicitous and very likely more heartfelt than adorns many of Congreve's compliments to his patrons, Congreve affirmed:

As Coin, which bears some awful Monarchs Face
For more than its Intrinsick Worth will pass:
So your bright Image, which we here behold,
Adds Worth to Worth, and dignifies the Gold.(79)

Tonson published four of Congreve's plays in fairly rapid succession: The Double-Dealer (1694), Love for Love (1695), The Mourning Bride (1697), and The Way of the World (1700). The Double-Dealer included Dryden's famous verses to Congreve, on which Edmund Gosse so aptly commented: “Perhaps since the beginning of literary history there is no other example of such fine and generous praise of a young colleague by a great old poet.”⁸⁰ Tonson did not have occasion to reprint the play until 1706. Love for Love was more popular and was reprinted in 1695, 1697, and 1704. The Mourning Bride was reprinted in 1697 and 1703 and The Way of the World in 1706. Meanwhile, theatrical productions of Congreve's plays by distinguished actors served to establish Congreve's reputation ever more firmly as the leading dramatist of his age. Jeremy Collier's attack on Congreve in A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) did not damage Congreve's fame, but Congreve added nothing to it by a somewhat frivolous reply in Amendments of Mr. Collier's False and Imperfect Citations, published by Tonson in the same year.

Congreve is represented in Tonson's Fourth Miscellany by his “Prologue to the Queen Upon Her Majesty's coming to see the Old Batchelour” and “To Cynthia Weeping and not Speaking.” In “To Mr. Congreve” in this volume Charles Hopkins expressed what seems to have been the consensus of Congreve's friends: “Beyond the Poet, we the Person love.”⁸¹ Tonson's Fifth Miscellany has a dozen of Congreve's lyrics, among which are two of the finest, “A Hue and Cry after Fair Amoret” and “Pious Selinda goes to Pray'rs.” In the 1716 edition of The Sixth Part of Miscellany Poems Tonson printed Congreve's Kit-Cat poem, “A Ballad: On the Victory at Audenarde,” with Joseph Keally's Latin translation of it. An indication of the popularity of the “Ballad” is a comment which Lady Cowper made to the Prince of Wales in 1714. She recorded in her Diary: “I told the Prince of Wales that before his coming hither [to England], I and my Children had constantly drunk his Health by the Name of Young Hanover Brave, which was the title Mr. Congreve had given him in a Ballad. This made him ask who Mr. Congreve was, and so gave me an Opportunity of saying all the Good of Mr. Congreve which I think he truly deserves.”⁸²

It became increasingly difficult to secure Congreve as a contributor to miscellanies. The editors of Luctus Britannici (1700) regretted that “no Fav'rite Congreve shines”⁸³ in their volume. Steele's Poetical Miscellanies, published by Tonson as a continuation of the Tonson series, has no contribution by Congreve. Steele reprinted here, however, his verses, “To Mr. Congreve, occasion'd by his Comedy, called, The Way of the World,”⁸⁴ and in dedicating the Miscellanies to Congreve observed that “the Town's opinion of them will be raised, when it sees them address'd to Mr. Congreve.”⁸⁵

Congreve's elegiac and political poems resemble the similar effusions of less gifted contemporaries. Tonson printed them elegantly, with the title pages of the elegies black bordered. The poems have not worn well nor contributed to Congreve's permanent fame, although at the time of printing they were well received. Much to Dr. Johnson's disgust, Congreve was not to be outdone by any one in extravagant pastoral imagery. In The Mourning Muse of Alexis (1695), one of the innumerable elegies on the death of Queen Mary, all Nature is convulsed at the Queen's death: swans die at her tomb, Echo mourns, water gods fill their urns with their tears, fauns and nymphs rove the plain distractedly, satyrs wound themselves, Pan breaks his pipe and Cupid his bow. Tonson printed a second edition of the poem that same year. The Tears of Amaryllis for Amyntas (1703), on the death of the Marquess of Blandford, has similar artificial pastoralism but in a quieter, more tender vein.

Like other contemporary poets, Congreve celebrated outstanding political events of his time: the victory of Namur in A Pindarique Ode, Humbly Offer'd to the King on His Taking Namure (1695); the Peace of Ryswick in The Birth of the Muse (1698); the victory of Ramillies in A Pindarique Ode, Humbly Offer'd to the Queen, On the Victorious Progress of Her Majesty's Arms, under the Conduct of the Duke of Marlborough (1706). Congreve equally applauded William's “resistless way”⁸⁶ and Anne's serenity “amidst the Jars / and Tumults of a World in Wars.”⁸⁷ In The Birth of the Muse, which Johnson with some justice considered “a miserable fiction,”⁸⁸ Jove is depicted as creating the Muse to sing heroic deeds, especially William's. The poem was eagerly anticipated. On October 5, 1697, Dr. J. Woodward wrote to John Evelyn: “Mr. Congreve is, I hear, engaged in a poem on occasion of the peace, and all who are acquainted with the performance of this gentleman expect something very extraordinary.”⁸⁹

Congreve's love of music is evidenced in the masque of The Judgment of Paris (1701) and A Hymn to Harmony (1703). Four distinguished composers competed on different days for prizes to be awarded for the best music for the masque. Congreve wrote to his friend Keally that on the occasion when Eccles' music was played, “the whole thing was better worth coming to see than the jubilee.”⁹⁰A Hymn to Harmony was probably solicited for the celebration of St. Cecilia's Day in 1703.

His active career as a dramatist had ended when in August, 1700, Congreve made a journey to Holland and Belgium with Jacob Tonson and Charles Mein. Mein was the first to return home, Congreve followed, probably in October, and Jacob was back in London a few months later.⁹¹

Five brief letters from Congreve to Tonson throw some further light on Congreve's personal relations with his publisher. In these slight epistles Congreve thanks Tonson for favors, expresses a desire to meet him, and concludes with most affectionate greetings. It was “agreeable news” when Love for Love was reprinted, and Congreve hoped “to hear more of the same kind every post.”⁹² When Tonson was again in Holland in 1703, Congreve reported that he and Jacob junior were printing “the Pastoral” (The Tears of Amaryllis) themselves to forestall a pirated edition. Congreve had a longing to see Barn Elms, but not until Jacob's return.⁹³ Because of ill health and his preoccupation, so greatly resented by Pope,⁹⁴ with Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, Congreve became less accessible. Nevertheless, the dramatist and his publisher remained on the most cordial terms. In his last surviving letter to Jacob (August 8, 1723), Congreve declared himself “with unalterable esteem and friendship Dear Jacob / Ever Yours.”⁹⁵

Although Congreve wrote no more plays after The Way of the World, he contributed Book III, a witty paraphrase in heroic couplets of advice to ladies, to Tonson's publication of Ovid's Art of Love and translated episodes in Book X of Garth's edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses. As a labor of love, he supervised for Tonson the first collected edition of The Dramatick Works of John Dryden in six volumes. In his Dedication of this work to the Duke of New-castle, Congreve paid Dryden a tribute which was both judicious and affectionate. “I had the happiness,” he recalled, “to be very Conversant, and as intimately acquainted, with Mr. Dryden, as the great Disproportion in our Years could allow me to be.” He had been “most sensibly touched” by Dryden's request that he should be “kind to his Remains.” Of Dryden's writings it could be said, “No man hath written in our Language so much, and so various Matter, and in so various Manners, so well.” Himself a master of exquisite prose, Congreve rightly claimed for Dryden: “His Prose has all the Clearness imaginable, together with all the Nobleness of Expression; all the Graces and Ornaments proper and peculiar to it, without deviating into the Language or Diction of Poetry.”⁹⁶

Tonson published in three volumes in 1710 a collected edition of Congreve's Works, which Congreve described in his Preface as “the least faulty Impression which has been printed.” The three volumes were distinguished by an excellent format, with good paper and large print. The plays had decorative headpieces and tailpieces, ornamented first initial letters for each act, and ornamental lines separating the scenes. In the second volume the opera of “Semele” appeared for the first time. The third volume consisted of poems “written occasionally at distant times,” with some pieces, chiefly prologues and epilogues, not previously printed. Tonson subsequently published a reissue of Congreve's Works in three volumes, followed by an edition in two volumes, “Revis'd by the Author.” A collected edition in three volumes was published by Tonson's nephew, Jacob junior, in 1730, after Congreve's death.

It is a safe guess that Congreve, “unreproachful man,”⁹⁷ was the most considerate among the writers who employed Tonson as publisher. By recognizing that publishers, as well as authors, have problems for which allowances must be made, Congreve must have earned Tonson's unceasing gratitude. In a note “To the Reader” in The Tears of Amaryllis for Amyntas, Congreve stated that he had intended these verses “rather privately to Condole, than publickly to Lament.” But since one copy of them had by accident been shown to a bookseller, “it was high time for me to prevent their appearing with more Faults than their own, which might probably have met with Encrease, if not from the Malice, or Ignorance, at least from the Carelessness of an under-hand Publisher.”⁹⁸ While conceding in his Preface to the 1710 edition of his Works that there were still “too many Errata” in those volumes, Congreve remarked with good-humored composure that “those of the Press, are to be reckoned amongst things which no Diligence can prevent.” And he quoted with approval Bayle's comment in the preface to the first edition of his Dictionary on the vexation of ineffectual supervision of the press: “Je l'oublie autant que je puis, animus meminisse horret.” One reason for publishing the collected Works was that in a recent spurious edition⁹⁹ the five plays had been “very faultily, as well as indirectly Published: in Prejudice both to the Author, and the Bookseller [Tonson] who has the Property of the Copy.”¹⁰⁰

Many of Tonson's “eminent hands” had varying degrees of success yet failed to reach the top of Jacob's ladder. Three others who did achieve enduring fame were Prior, Addison, and Steele.

Matthew Prior was discovered at an early age by the Earl of Dorset. The Earl found the boy, in the tavern where he assisted his uncle, poring over a copy of Horace, and saw that the lad was capable of making graceful translations of what he was reading for the diversion of gentlemen of literary taste who frequented the tavern. Dorset paid for the continued education of “Matt” at Westminster School, and it was probably Dorset who introduced Prior to Tonson and recommended him for membership in the Kit-Cat Club.

Not long after Matt received his B.A. degree at St. John's College, Cambridge, he joined his friend and fellow alumnus, Charles Montague, in the composition of The Hind and the Panther Transvers'd To the Story of The Country-Mouse and the City-Mouse, published anonymously by W. Davis in 1687. At a time when Dryden's The Hind and the Panther was “in everybody's hands” and “very much cried up for a masterpiece,” Prior and Montague, and no doubt many other readers, were struck by the absurdity of four-footed beasts' engaging in religious controversy. According to James Montague, Charles's brother, when Matt and Charles met one day at James's chambers in the Middle Temple, Charles picked up a copy of The Hind and the Panther which lay open on a table and read aloud the first four lines, then proposed writing a parody of the poem in the manner of Horace's fable of the city mouse and the country mouse. Matt took the book from Charles's hands and quickly composed the first four lines of the parody, the reading of which “set the Company in Laughter.” On a loose sheet of paper Charles wrote four more lines, and between them the two produced in due course a merry satire which, when published, became immediately popular.¹⁰¹ It was soon known who were the authors, and, as has been noted, the reputation “Mouse Montague” acquired for the poem was the foundation of his diplomatic career.

Although Prior's political advancement came slowly and brought him more hard work and vexation than honor, he attracted early and favorable notice by poetical contributions to contemporary periodicals. His verses “To the Honourable Charles Montague” were published in The Gentleman's Journal in 1692, introduced by a puff from Motteux, the editor: “Whilst things like the following Stanza's made by Mr. Prior, shall be given or sent me, you may believe I shall be prouder of making them publick than my own.”¹⁰² In the same journal in the same year appeared two of Prior's lyrics, “Whilst I am scorch'd with hot desire” and “An Ode—While blooming youth and gay delight.” Also in 1692 Prior contributed to Gildon's edition of Miscellany Poems Upon Several Occasions “A Letter from Mr. Prior to Mr. Fleetwood Sheppard,” in which Prior offered Dorset's steward at Copt Hall a pleasant, jesting account of a day in the country. Tonson would have noted with amusement the reference to himself:

T—n, who is himself a Wit,
Counts Authors Merits by the Sheet;
Thus each should down with all he thinks,
As Boys eat Bread to fill up Chinks.(103)

Prior published anonymously before 1700 three poems which he persistently refused to acknowledge as his. Written c. 1687, “Satyr on the Poets, in imitation of the Seventh Satyr of Juvenal,” was first published in Chorus Poetarum in 1694, again in Poems on Affairs of State in 1698. The poem is so severe a satire on contemporary poets, including “Drudge Dryden,” that Prior admitted:

More I cou'd say; but care not much to meet
A Crab-Tree Cudgel, in a narrow Street.

He attacked Mulgrave, the Lord Chamberlain, who had satirized Dorset, in the biting couplet:

Dance then Attendance in slow Mulgrave's Hall,
Read Mapps, or count the sconces till he call.(104)

Later on, when Mulgrave had become his patron, Prior had no desire to claim the authorship of this poem. “A Satire on the Modern Translators,” published in 1697 in Poems on Affairs of State, may later have struck Prior as too harsh an indictment of contemporary writers. A second letter “To Mr. Fleetwood Shepherd” was also printed in 1697 in Poems on Affairs of State. With unbecoming levity in this poem, as he ultimately concluded, Prior complained to Dorset, by way of the Earl's steward, that he had been neglected while his fellow “mouse” had received advancement:

My Friend C—s M—ue's Preferr'd;
Nor would I have it long observ'd,
That one Mouse eats, while t'other's starv'd.(105)

As his recent editors have remarked, Prior's subsequent relations with Montague “were not such as to permit much joking.”¹⁰⁶ When Prior became a convert to Toryism, Halifax remained his best friend among the Kit-Cats.

Although his Tory alliances cost Prior his much-prized membership in the Kit-Cat Club, he enjoyed for a quarter of a century the unbroken author-publisher relationship that early in his career he established with Jacob Tonson. Tonson was Prior's publisher for the first time in 1692, when he printed Prior's “political panegyric,” An Ode in Imitation of the Second Ode of the Third Book of Horace, Prior's fulsome tribute to King William in celebration of the naval victory of La Hogue in May of that year. In 1693 Prior had the pleasure of filling up half a dozen “chinks” in Tonson's Third Miscellany. Tonson reprinted in this volume Prior's “Letter to the Honourable Mr. Charles Montague” and “An Ode—While blooming youth and gay delight,” as well as several new pieces. In 1694 two more poems by Prior were included in Tonson's Fourth Miscellany: “To Lady Dursley” and “For the New Year: To the Sun,” a New Year's greeting to King William from The Hague, where Prior was then acting as secretary to the English Ambassador.

Tonson sent two urgent requests to Prior in Holland, relayed by Sir William Trumbull, Secretary of State, to compose a poem on the death of Queen Mary. Begging pardon for his “sin of omission,” Prior wrote to Trumbull in April, 1695, that he now had “a poem on the stocks to be given to his Majesty at his arrival here, which I will send to Mr. Tonson to be reprinted in England, and since that cur instigated the writing of it, I hope it may lie unsold and contribute to the breaking of him.”¹⁰⁷ It may be assumed that Trumbull knew better than to take this remark at its face value, for Prior was sensitive to criticism and set a high value on his poetical talents. The poem, published by Tonson in May, 1695, was entitled To the King, An Ode on His Majesty's Arrival in Holland. In the same extravagant vein which mars all of Prior's political panegyrics, as well as those of his contemporaries, King William is assured that

                    Mary reigns a Saint in Heaven,
And Thou a Demi-God below.(108)

Prior continued, for over a decade, to produce at intervals other topical pieces, first in honor of William and his victories and then, with more genuine conviction, in honor of Anne.

At the expense of Boileau, Prior indulged his wit anonymously in An English Ballad: In Answer to Mr. Despreaux's Pindarique Ode on the Taking of Namure, published by Tonson in September, 1695. Enclosing the poem in a letter to Tonson, Prior commented: “If you think this trifle worth yor printing, 'tis at yor service,” though it “probably may lye the lumber of yor shop with some of my former works.” He instructed his publisher to show the piece “immediately” to Mr. Montague, who possibly might “alter a line or two in it” and to print the French text on one side of the page and his own English text on the other. He cautioned: “I will positively have no name sett to it, for a secretary at thirty is hardly allowed the privilege of burlesque.” Perhaps Sir Fleetwood Shepherd could suggest a better title.¹⁰⁹ Trumbull supervised the publication of the poem and again enjoined Tonson's silence as to the authorship.¹¹⁰ The poem appeared with the text of Boileau's dull ode in neat small print opposite Prior's poem in very large print.

Prior returned to formal eulogy in Verses Humbly Presented to the King. At His Arrival in Holland After the late horrid Conspiracy against His most Sacred Person (1696) and Carmen Saeculare for the Year 1700 (1700). He honored Anne's birthday with his Prologue Spoken at Court Before the Queen (1704) and offered her a New Year's greeting in An Ode to the Sun for the New Year (1707). He celebrated the battle of Blenheim in A Letter to Monsieur Boileau Depreaux Occasion'd by the Victory at Blenheim (1704), and the battle of Ramillies in An Ode, Humbly Inscrib'd to the Queen (1706) and An Epistle from the Elector of Bavaria to the French King (1706).

Always dubious about the merits of the heroic couplet, Prior experimented in An Ode, Humbly Inscrib'd to the Queen, with the Spenserian stanza, thereby initiating the vogue of imitating Spenser. Less than a month after Tonson had published the Ode, Prior wrote to Lord Cholmondeley, “As to Spenser, my Lord, I think we have gained our point, every body acknowledges him to have been a fine Poet, tho three Months since not one in 50 had read him: Upon my Soul, 'tis true, the Wits have sent for the Book, the Fairy Queen is on their Toilette table, and some of our Ducal acquaintance will be deep in that Mythologico-Poetical way of thinking.”¹¹¹

In 1702 Tonson printed in a single folio sheet one of Prior's half-cynical, half-wistful amorous tales, To a Young Gentleman in Love. Tonson's Fifth Miscellany included several of Prior's most charming lyrics, notably “To a Child of Quality,” “The Lady's Looking Glass,” and “The Despairing Shepherd,” as well as the lubricious, witty, and well-told tales, “Hans Carvel” and “The Ladle.” An unreliable judge of his own poetry, Prior never chose to reprint “To a Child of Quality,” which he had addressed to Lady Mary Villiers, the engaging little daughter of Edward Villiers, first Earl of Jersey. It is possible that Prior's original admiration for Lady Mary cooled because his friendship with her Jacobite family was a contributing factor to his political disgrace. This brightest jewel of the Fifth Miscellany, which Swinburne was to praise as “the most adorable of nursery idyls that ever was or will be in our language,”¹¹² did not appear in a collected edition of Prior's poems until 1740, nearly twenty years after his death.

As the most popular poet of his time, Prior could not escape the doubtful compliment of pirated editions. One of his prettiest amorous tales, “The English Padlock,” written for the diversion of the Kit-Cats,¹¹³ appeared in a spurious version in The Diverting Post in January, 1705. A second spurious version appeared soon afterward, published by “Jacob Tompson [sic].” Then Tonson himself published in the same year an authentic text. Unfortunately, more serious piracies of Prior's verses were to follow, the chief culprit being “the unspeakable Curll.”

Edmund Curll was the most unscrupulous publisher of the eighteenth century, a thorn in the flesh of despairing authors and of all reputable publishers.¹¹⁴ If a writer complained that one of his books had been published by Curll without his consent, Curll might retaliate by advertising a second volume as “corrected by the author.” When Curll stole works for which Tonson held the copyright, Tonson could and did protest, but in vain. By devious means Curll managed to acquire good works which he published repeatedly among many worthless ones. His editions of Prior's poems are examples of his flagrant methods.

On January 24, 1707, Tonson advertised in The Daily Courant that all “Genuine Copys” of Prior were in his hands and he intended speedily to publish “a correct Edition.”¹¹⁵ A week later, on January 31, Curll advertised in the same newspaper: “This day is publish'd Poems on Several Occasions; consisting of Ode's, Satyrs, and Epistles: With some Select Translations and Imitations. By Mr. Prior, Gent. (now first Correctly Printed.)”¹¹⁶ Curll listed the publishers as R. Burrough, J. Baker, E. Curll, E. Place, and E. Sanger. On February 6 Prior published in The Daily Courant an indignant denunciation of Curll's volume. “Whereas there is lately Printed and Publish'd Poems on several Occasions by Mr. Prior, Mr. Prior thinks himself obliged to certify that the said Poems were Printed and Publish'd without his knowledge and consent, that some Pieces in the said Collection are not Genuine, the Copies of the rest Spurious and Defective, particularly as to the Names of Persons, and the Errata innumerable.”¹¹⁷ Undeterred by Prior's intervention, Curll again advertised his edition on March 27 as “now publish'd and correctly Printed.”¹¹⁸ This time the publishers were listed as Edmund Curll, Charles Smith, and J. Baker.

Curll found it expedient to preface his 1707 edition with the following publisher's note:

The name of Mr. Prior is a more Satisfactory Recommendation of the following Sheets to those Gentlemen who are Judges of Poetry, than whatever can be offer'd in their Behalf.

All that I have endeavour'd, (and which by the Assistance of some Friends, I have accomplish'd) is, that the several Pieces herein contain'd, should appear more Perfect and Correct by their Publication, than they have hitherto done elsewhere; and that no Copy should be inserted, 'till I was assur'd of its being Genuine.¹¹⁹

Curll reprinted seventeen poems by Prior, several from the miscellanies and a number of others. He published the first of Prior's epistles to Fleetwood Shepherd with the title, “A Second Epistle to Sir Fleetwood Sheppard.”

Included in the collection were four poems which Prior particularly objected to having associated with his name: “A Satyr on the Modern Translators of Ovid's Epistles”; “The Seventh Satyr of Juvenal, imitated” (“Satyr on the Poets”); “An Epistle to Sir Fleetwood Sheppard” (the letter “To Mr. Fleetwood Shepherd” printed in 1697); and “Some Passages of Mr. Dryden's Hind and Panther; Burlesqu'd or Varied,” with parallels from Dryden's poem printed on opposite pages. Apropos of the parody of Dryden, Prior lost no time in writing to Halifax:

Some rogue of a bookseller has made a very improper Collection of what He calls my writings, the Whole is mutilated, Names printed at length and things written near Twenty years since, mingled with some written the other Day; in such a Manner as may do Me harm, part of the Mouse is likewise inserted, which I had little to say to otherwise than as I held the pen to what Mr. Montague dictated; I mention this, my Lord, desiring your Lordship to believe this book was printed without my knowledge or consent.¹²⁰

Prior's disclaiming his share of the parody has been commonly regarded as merely an extravagant gesture of compliment to an influential friend whom he could not afford to offend.

When Tonson published his collected edition of Prior's Poems on Several Occasions in 1709, Prior repeated in the Preface his grievance against Curll:

The greatest Part of what I have Writ having already been Publish'd, either singly or else in some of the Miscellanies, it would be too late for me to make any excuse for appearing in Print. But a Collection of Poems has lately appeared under my Name, tho' without my Knowledge, in which the Publisher has given me the Honour of some things that did not belong to me, and has Transcribed others so imperfectly, that I hardly knew them to be mine. This has obliged me in my own Defence, to look back upon some of those lighter Studies, which I ought long since to have quitted, and to Publish an indifferent Collection of Poems, for fear of being thought the Author of a worse.

Thus I beg Pardon of the Publick for Reprinting some Pieces, which as they came singly from their first Impression, have, I fancy, lain long and quietly in Mr. Tonson's Shop; and with others which were never before Printed, and might have lain as quietly, and perhaps more safely, in a Corner of my own Study.¹²¹

As often happened in that age, when author and publisher needed to defend the superior merits of a new edition, in this instance a genuine one, Prior overstated his case. All of the poems printed by Curll were by Prior, and none was mutilated beyond recognition. To be sure, the earlier edition was incomplete, and there were many errata, some of them quite ridiculous.¹²²

It may be wondered why Tonson chose to publish the 1709 edition of Prior's poems after Prior had already defected to the Tories. Tonson's honor as a publisher had, of course, been involved in the dispute with Curll. Moreover, Tonson never allowed political differences to divorce him from a writer whose works he found it lucrative to publish. As the “Augustan Horace,” Prior was much in vogue. His lyrics were frequently set to music, and one of them, “The Despairing Shepherd,” appeared in as many as fourteen song books.¹²³ Prior continued to be pirated, and Tonson continued to be his legitimate publisher.

Tonson published fifty-seven of Prior's poems in the 1709 edition, presumably omitting only those poems Prior did not wish to claim. Among the hitherto unpublished poems were such memorable pieces as “An Ode: The Merchant to secure his Treasure,” “To Cloe Weeping,” “Cupid Mistaken,” “Venus Mistaken,” and “Reading Mézeray's History of France,” with that haunting last line which Scott was to consider one of the finest cadences in English verse.

In 1716 Curll brought out a Second Collection of Poems on Several Occasions, a still slenderer edition of Prior than he had published in 1707. Prior at once disowned the book in The London Gazette.¹²⁴ Among the thirteen poems in Curll's collection, only four had been printed since Tonson's 1709 edition, two of which Curll had already pirated.¹²⁵ One of these, “Erle Robert's Mice,” a humorous plea to the Earl of Oxford for advancement, written in imitation of Chaucer, was the only one of his “mouse” poems which Prior later collected.

Prior's difficult and worrisome activities in France during the last years of Anne's reign gave him almost no time and perhaps little inclination for writing poetry. The fall of the diplomats whom he had loyally but somewhat uncomfortably served involved his own. Although the Secret Committee appointed to investigate the conduct of the discredited Tory ministry was unable to bring specific charges against Prior, he was kept in custody from June 9, 1715, to June 26, 1716, and was never granted a pardon. Friends did rally around him; Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford, gave him a country retreat; and an expensive edition of his poems was undertaken in his behalf.

The 1718 edition of Prior's verse, published by Tonson and Barber, launched the long poems, “Alma” and “Solomon,” which have not enhanced Prior's posthumous reputation, and a new little sheaf of delicious Cloe poems, including “A Better Answer to Cloe Jealous,” which have. Prior had ambitious plans for this collection and devoted much time and thought to work on it. Tonson was cooperative, and the result was one of the handsomest and literally the weightiest volume that Tonson's press produced. The list of subscribers filled thirty-nine columns, and Prior made a needed profit of four thousand guineas.

Prior had been dogged by misfortune. Addison, on the contrary, as his contemporaries would have agreed, was an eminently successful man. His rise to fame was swift, calm, and orderly, each step being carefully calculated. Besides possessing great literary gifts, Addison had an unsurpassed skill in calling public attention to them in the right quarters. As soon as he had set foot on Jacob Tonson's ladder, Addison knew very well how to help himself.

Addison's ten years of scholarly life in Oxford were profitably spent. His Latin poems attracted very favorable notice in Oxford and Cambridge “before he was talked of as a Poet in Town.”¹²⁶ Dryden, who is said to have introduced him to Congreve and who probably introduced him to Tonson, could not have been otherwise than pleased by Addison's first English poem, “To Mr. Dryden,” which Tonson published in his Third Miscellany. His own age would not have considered excessive Addison's claim for Dryden:

Thy Lines have heighten'd Virgil's Majesty,
And Horace wonders at himself in Thee.(127)

In the Fourth Miscellany, Addison is represented by four contributions: most of Virgil's “Fourth Georgic”; “A Song for St. Cecilia's Day”; “The Story of Salmacis,” from the fourth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses; and “An Account of the Greatest English Poets,” which ends the volume. Addison never chose to collect the “Account”; and indeed the pretentious poem betrays all too clearly the fact that the youthful poet, so well acquainted with classical authors, had a limited knowledge of the history of English poetry. Shakespeare is not mentioned; Chaucer is criticized for his “unpolish'd strain”; Spenser for his “fulsom” and “long-spun Allegories”; Milton because he varnished over “the Guilt of Faithless Men.”¹²⁸

In 1695 Addison acted as a sort of literary agent for Tonson in Oxford. Although a proposed translation of Herodotus, in which several Oxford scholars were involved, failed to materialize, Addison was encouraged by Tonson to continue work as a translator. On May 28, 1695, Addison wrote to Tonson that the latter's remarks on translating Ovid “made such an impression on me” that in his leisure hours he had “ventured” on the second book of Ovid's Metamorphoses and had it ready for Tonson to read.¹²⁹ The victory of Namur gave Addison an opportunity to show his loyalty to William and to the Whig ministry in A Poem to His Majesty, which Tonson published in an excellent folio edition. Addison dedicated the poem to Somers, whom he respectfully invited to receive the tribute of “a Muse unknown.” Addison noted that the King confided to Somers

His Inmost Thoughts, determining the Doom
Of Towns unstorm'd and Battels yet to come.

If the Lord Keeper would but “Smile upon my Lays,” the poet would be “Secure of Fame.”¹³⁰ Somers was suitably impressed, and his patronage secured for Addison a fellowship for three years of travel on the Continent. Before leaving England, Addison was serviceable to Dryden by writing an essay on the “Georgics,” as well as all of the prose arguments for the “Aeneis” for Dryden's Virgil, although preferring to have his name “concealed”; and Dryden expressed his gratitude in generous praise of the “most Ingenious Mr. Addison of Oxford” for his “Fourth Georgic.” “After his Bees,” wrote Dryden, “my latter Swarm is scarcely worth the hiving.”¹³¹

At the conclusion of his European tour, Addison met Tonson in Amsterdam in 1703. Somerset had commissioned Tonson to offer Addison the post of traveling tutor to his son Algernon, Earl of Hertford. One of the very few lapses in tact of which Addison was ever guilty was so chilly a reaction to the financial arrangements proposed for him by Somerset that Somerset considered himself rudely rebuffed and abruptly broke off the negotiation. To Tonson as intermediary this awkward affair must have been embarrassing, although Somerset confined his resentment to Addison. The “Proud Duke” wrote “finis” to the episode with a gracious apology to Tonson: “I am very sorry that I have given you soe much trouble in it but I know you are good & will forgive it, in one that is soe much your friend & humble servant / Somerset.”¹³²

Addison chose to address to Halifax his “Letter from Italy” written in 1701, which Tonson published as the opening poem in his Fifth Miscellany, where he also published substantial portions of Addison's translations from Books II and III of Ovid's Metamorphoses and an episode from the third book of Virgil's Aeneid. According to Tickell, the “Letter” was admired as “the most exquisite” of Addison's “poetical performances.”¹³³ Halifax, who, like Somers, could lend an attentive ear to suave flattery, soon found an opportunity to be friend the promising young emulator of his own superior “Muse.” When the services of a Whig poet were required to celebrate the victory of Blenheim, Halifax advised Godolphin to summon Addison, who was then living in very humble London lodgings, to undertake that task.

The result was The Campaign, which Tonson published on December 14, 1704, on the very day of Marlborough's return to London in triumph. The Campaign was an immediate success and brought Addison an appointment as Commissioner of Appeals in the Excise. The imagination of Addison's contemporaries was charmed by the comparison of Marlborough to an angel who

                    pleas'd th' Almighty's orders to perform
Rides in the whirl-wind and directs the storm.(134)

The poem was quickly reprinted and acquired a fifth edition by 1713.

Addison once more commended himself to Somers in dedicating to him Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, printed by Tonson in 1705. In his Dedication, Addison observed: “should I publish any Favours done me by your Lordship, I am afraid it would look more like Vanity than Gratitude.” The journey and the book had been carefully planned in advance, and Addison had brought with him from England passages from classical authors for use as illustrations.¹³⁵ Addison's preoccupation with ancient, rather than modern, Italy did not strike his contemporaries as pedantic. The sale of the book “increased from year to year, and the demand for copies was so urgent, that the price rose to four or five times the original value, before it came out in a second edition.”¹³⁶ The Remarks had many editions. The book was translated into French, and it became “the indispensable companion of every young man upon the grand tour.”¹³⁷

Addison's opera Rosamond, published by Tonson in 1707, failed on the stage, although it had a second edition that same year and a third in 1713. Meanwhile, Addison was succeeding politically. He had become an under-secretary of state and in 1709 received the post of chief secretary to Wharton, who had been appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He contributed to Tonson's Sixth Miscellany a graceful paraphrase of the third ode of Book III of the Odes of Horace.

Addison was in Ireland when Steele, under the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff, began publishing The Tatler, which appeared three times a week from April, 1709, to January, 1711. The journal was not printed by Tonson but by Lillie and Morphew, who also brought out a collected edition in four volumes in 1710-1711. By the middle of 1711, however, the Tonsons took over the edition.¹³⁸The Tatler proved to be the most successful periodical the English press had thus far achieved. Although the paper was essentially Steele's, Addison contributed anonymously 42 of the 271 numbers. In his preface to the fourth volume Steele handsomely acknowledged the help of “one gentleman [Addison] who will be nameless” and confessed that he was “undone by my Auxiliary; when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without him.”¹³⁹

The Spectator, to which Addison contributed nearly half of the numbers, appeared six times a week, from March, 1711, to December, 1712, and was revived by Addison alone from June to December, 1714. The early issues were printed by Samuel Buckley. Charles Lillie's name was soon added to Buckley's but dropped in October, 1712, when Tonson replaced Lillie.¹⁴⁰ The collected papers were published in eight volumes: I-IV in 1712, and V-VII in 1713 by Buckley and Tonson; VIII in 1715 by Tonson. On November 10, 1712, Addison and Steele sold their title to the first seven volumes, a half share to Buckley and a half to Tonson's nephew, Jacob junior, each paying £575. On October 13, 1714, Buckley reassigned his half share to Tonson for £500; and on August 27 the following year, the title to Volume VIII was sold by Addison to Tonson for £53 15s.¹⁴¹ It is usually impossible to determine what portions of the Tonson publishing business became the immediate responsibility of Tonson's nephew, but the Buckley-Tonson agreement which Jacob junior signed has been preserved.¹⁴² It is not unlikely that Jacob junior handled directly the negotiations for all of the journals which the two Jacobs, uncle and nephew, published for Addison and Steele.

A Whig, but a cautious Whig, Addison determined the nonparty tone of The Spectator, being “resolved to observe an exact Neutrality between the Whigs and Tories.”¹⁴³ The two essayists likewise effected Addison's objective of bringing “Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses.”¹⁴⁴ The paper was taken in to Queen Anne every morning with her breakfast. It became a part of a polite lady's tea equipage, and its circulation spread to the provinces, where it was sometimes read aloud to village groups. In the second year of publication The Spectator had a daily circulation of between three and four thousand copies.¹⁴⁵ Each published volume sold about nine thousand copies.¹⁴⁶

The Guardian, a daily paper by “Nestor Ironside,” printed by Tonson, ran from March to October, 1713. Addison joined Steele in the journal with No. 67 and contributed fifty papers. A collected edition was published by Tonson in 1714. As in The Tatler and The Spectator, Addison did not publicly acknowledge his participation, but the tribute Steele paid to his unnamed collaborator could have left no doubt as to his identity. In a note to the reader in the collected edition, Steele explained that a hand at the end of certain papers indicated contributions “by a Gentleman [Addison] who has obliged the World with Productions too sublime to admit that the Author of them should receive any Addition to his Reputation from such loose occasional Thoughts as make up these little Treatises. For which reason his name shall be concealed.”¹⁴⁷ Steele took advantage of the excellent facilities offered in The Guardian for advertising Addison's classical tragedy, Cato, the phenomenal vogue of which conveniently coincided with the period when the journal was appearing daily.

On April 14, 1713, Steele announced in The Guardian that Cato would be acted “this day” at Drury Lane, with Prologue and Epilogue by Pope and Garth, respectively. On April 27 Tonson published the first edition, on May 7 the third, and on May 9 the fourth. The Guardian announced on May 19: “There is sold a Pyrated Edition of this Play, wherein are numberless gross Faults and several Scenes left out. The Edition Published and Corrected by the Author, and printed for J. Tonson, has a head of Cato taken from an old Medal, Printed in the Title Page to distinguish it from that which is Spurious and Imperfect.”¹⁴⁸ On May 22 the fifth edition of the play was published, on June 5 the sixth, on June 26 the seventh, a small number being printed on very fine paper and “curiously bound”; and on August 31 the eighth edition appeared in a neat pocket volume. In July, Tonson published a French translation of the play.

Addison had written part of this tragedy during his travels. He was encouraged to complete it because the Whigs were in need of political ammunition. Characteristically, however, Addison took pains to make Cato seem a non-partisan plea for liberty, and both parties gave it their seal of approval. The stage production had an unprecedented run of thirty-five nights and ended in May only because Mrs. Oldfield, who played Cato's daughter Marcia, was expecting a child and had been keeping a midwife behind the scenes for several nights.¹⁴⁹ The play attracted such crowds of spectators that “every Night seem'd to be the first.”¹⁵⁰ On April 30 Pope wrote to Caryll: “The town is so fond of it, that the orange wenches and fruit women in the Park offer the books at the side of the coaches, and the Prologue and Epilogue are cried about the streets by the common hawkers.”¹⁵¹ By the end of the year Cato had cleared £1,350 to each of the managers of Drury Lane.¹⁵² The play was translated into various European languages, the Italian translation by Antonio Mario Salvini being particularly admired. Well might Tonson consider that the large sum of £107 10s. which he paid Addison for the copyright of Cato¹⁵³ was one of the best investments of his publishing career.

During the last years of his life, Addison's official duties and ill health reduced his literary activities. His social position, but apparently not his happiness, was enhanced by his marriage in 1716 to the Countess of Warwick, a coolly calculated maneuver in the opinion of Jacob Tonson, who seems never to have liked Addison personally.¹⁵⁴ In 1717 Addison's ambition was further gratified by his appointment as Secretary of State for the Southern Department.

In comparison with Steele's, Addison's efforts in political journalism were limited and discreet. The Whig Examiner (1710) had only five numbers. The Freeholder (1715-1716), published twice a week for fifty-five numbers, was regarded by Steele as far too mild in tone, although Addison defended Whig principles in that paper with more vigor than he would have considered advisable in the last years of the reign of Queen Anne. Midwinter and Tonson printed The Freeholder in a collected edition in 1716; the volume had many editions and was translated into French. In December, 1715, Tonson published Addison's To Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales, with the Tragedy of Cato, and To Godfrey Kneller on His Picture of the King. There were three editions of these two poems the following year. A comedy, The Drummer, which he had written many years before, was handed over by Addison to Steele and published anonymously by Tonson in 1716. The Drummer did not attract attention until the play was published posthumously under Addison's name; by the end of the century it had had nine English editions, and it was translated into French, German, and Italian. The Campaign was reprinted in the 1716 edition of Tonson's Sixth Miscellany.

In the midst of a needless and unresolved quarrel with Steele, Addison died in 1719. The two friends had taken opposite sides in The Old Whig and The Plebeian concerning a bill, ultimately abandoned, to limit the creation of peers by the king. Sadly and abruptly, an intimate friendship of many years was thus destroyed.

Richard Steele did not, like Addison, have a long and peaceful literary apprenticeship as a university student. He left Merton College, Oxford, without a degree in 1692, enlisted as a soldier, and joined the Royal Horse Guards. Steele's military life did not preclude, however, a strong bias toward literature; and like Congreve, Addison, and so many other young writers, he paid tribute to the deceased Queen Mary in a funeral poem in her memory, The Procession, published by Tonson in 1695 as “By a Gentleman of the Army.” Steele dedicated this undistinguished poem to Lord Cutts, colonel of the Coldstream Guards, who transferred Steele to his own company and made him his secretary. Steele became an ensign in Cutts's company, later a captain.

Too easily tempted to lead the life of a careless but by no means heartless young rake, Steele undoubtedly counted among his sins the seduction of Elizabeth Tonson, the sister of Jacob junior, who bore him a daughter, Elizabeth “Ousley,” in 1699 or 1700.¹⁵⁵ The life of the child's mother remains almost a blank. Elizabeth Tonson lived with her mother in her brother's family, perhaps assisting in the bookshop and, like her mother, receiving a quarterly annuity from her brother.¹⁵⁶ She died in 1726 at the age of forty-six.¹⁵⁷ Steele had a warm affection for his illegitimate daughter. He sent her to boarding school, eventually transferred her to his own household, and arranged, probably with the Tonsons, her marriage to William Aynston,¹⁵⁸ a glove manufacturer of Almeley, Herefordshire. Steele left her £100 in his will. “The witty Mrs. Aynston” addressed verses to her cousin, Mary Tonson, Jacob junior's eldest daughter, as “dear nymph,” and was evidently a welcome guest at Barn Elms.¹⁵⁹

In the mood of one who has erred and repents, Steele produced his first prose work, a sober moral treatise, The Christian Hero, published by Tonson in 1701. He dedicated this volume to Lord Cutts and hoped that it would be read by “Men of Wit and Gallantry,” especially by his fellow soldiers. Some years afterward, Steele disclosed that he had written the tract for his private use, to fix on his mind a strong impression of virtue and religion; but since this “secret Admonition was too weak,” he had printed the book with his name “as a standing Testimony against himself,” that he might be “ashamed of understanding and seeming to feel what was Virtuous, and living so quite contrary a Life.”¹⁶⁰ In a review and comparison of pagan and Christian ethics, unfavorable to the former, Steele affirmed his conviction that we are “framed” for mutual kindness, good will, and service. Popular at a time when “morality” was becoming fashionable in literature, the book reached a sixth edition in 1712 and had twenty editions in the course of the century.

Steele soon discovered that the yardstick of his ideal hero was being too scrupulously applied to his own conduct, and “to enliven his Character”¹⁶¹ he wrote his first comedy, The Funeral, which Tonson published in 1702. Linton printed Steele's second comedy, The Lying Lover (1704), perhaps offering Steele a better price for it (£21 10s.) than Tonson. Finding that the play was “damn'd for its piety,”¹⁶² Steele combined mirth and morality more successfully in his next comedy, The Tender Husband, which Tonson published in 1705 and which Steele dedicated to Addison as a “Memorial of an Inviolable Friendship.”¹⁶³The Funeral and The Tender Husband were printed together by Tonson in an attractive edition in 1712 and reprinted in 1717.

Steele began editing The London Gazette in late April or early May, 1707, and Jacob junior took over the printing of the paper the following year. With the change in ministry, Steele was removed as editor in October, 1710. Irked by the lack of freedom which this conservative newspaper offered him, he had already embarked on The Tatler as a more suitable vehicle for independent journalism. Here his taste for political controversy was held in check by Addison, but not sufficiently to prevent the sudden demise of this popular paper, in which Steele had risked attacking leading Tories after the fall of the Whig ministry. It was Addison who determined that The Spectator should be a purely literary journal with nothing partisan about it. Gay, who had the highest praise for both The Tatler and The Spectator, regretted Steele's “unaccountable Imprudence” in attacking the Tories when his reputation was at its height and noted that the disappearance of The Tatler “seem'd to be bewailed as some general Calamity.”¹⁶⁴ The ensuing “Blaze” of The Spectator had delighted all “unbyassed well-wishers to Learning”; and it must be hoped, cautioned Gay, that “the known Temper and Prudence” of one of the two editors (Addison) would hinder the other (Steele) from again “lashing out into Party.”¹⁶⁵

But Steele's ardent political convictions as “a lover of his country” could not be suppressed, and he elected to follow a bold course as a political journalist. On August 7, 1713, in No. 128 of The Guardian, Steele protested the failure of the French to demolish the fort and harbor of Dunkirk, as agreed in the Treaty of Utrecht. At Addition's request, he continued his strictures on this subject outside of The Guardian. He published on September 22 The Importance of Dunkirk considered, which did lead at once to some steps in the direction he advocated. Addison withdrew from The Guardian, Steele ended the paper on October 1, and the two essayists went their separate ways. On October 12, Addison wrote to John Hughes: “I am in a thousand troubles for poor Dick, and wish that his zeal for the public may not be ruinous to himself: but he has sent me word that he is determined to go on, and that any advice I may give him in this particular, will have no weight with him.”¹⁶⁶

Two days after the last Guardian, Steele started The Englishman, published by Samuel Buckley. The paper appeared three times a week for fifty-seven numbers. In this new journal, devoted exclusively to politics, Steele kept advertising The Crisis, published by Ferdinand Burleigh, the most important of his political tracts, in which he rashly stressed the threat of the Queen's government to the Hanoverian succession. The Crisis and two papers in The Englishman cost Steele his recently acquired seat in the House of Commons. Invectives against him, Steele observed, “came out stitch'd, bound, and in loose Papers for some Months every Week.”¹⁶⁷ When Steele wrote The Tatler, persons of all classes, said Colley Cibber, were Steele's friends, “and thought their Tea in a Morning had not its Taste without him”; but when he wrote as a patriot, half of the nation denied he had wit, sense, or genius.¹⁶⁸ At any rate, Steele had an impressively large reading public. An eighteenth-century historian alleged that “perhaps there never was in the annals of political literature a book more universally read, or so much the subject of conversation as The Crisis.”¹⁶⁹

Preoccupied with politics, Steele had little time for non-political writing. He was at work as one of the editors of Tonson's Sixth Miscellany in the winter of 1709. In one of his numerous brief notes to his wife, he referred to this enterprise, informing her that he was “indispensably obliged” to dine at Tonson's, where, after dinner, some papers were to be read, “whereof, among others, I am to be a Judge.”¹⁷⁰ In 1714 Tonson published Steele's Poetical Miscellanies. The small volume included poems by Pope and Gay and such examples of a new romantic lyricism as Parnell's “Hymn on Contentment” and Lady Winchilsea's “A Sigh.” Besides reprinting here his own complimentary verses on The Way of the World, Steele ended the volume with “The Procession,” the poem in which he had first proclaimed his Whig sympathies. For a few months in 1714 Steele edited and Tonson published two literary journals, The Lover and The Reader, which Tonson, J. Brown, and O. Lloyd printed in a collected edition at the end of the year. The Ladies Library (1714), published by Tonson, is only a compilation of Steele's borrowings from edifying moral essays. Advertised, like similar works, as “very proper for a New Year's Gift for the Ladies,” the book had a large sale.

Mr. Steele's Apology for Himself and His Writings, Occasioned by his Expulsion from the House of Commons, was published by Burleigh in October, 1714. The essay had been printed shortly before the death of Queen Anne, “but upon that Accident,” said Steele, “the Publication was deferred.”¹⁷¹ With warmth and eloquence Steele defended his political activities, being much less concerned for his fame as a writer than as “an honest Man.” By every means that his pen afforded, he had sought to rouse his country “from a Lethargy from which she has awaked only to behold her Danger, and upon seeing it too great has only sighed, folded her Arms, and returned to her Trance.”¹⁷²

The joint labors of Steele and Jacob junior as editor and printer involved late hours for Steele at the printing house of the Tonsons in Earl's Court, Bow Street, near Covent Garden,¹⁷³ as Steele's hurried notes to his wife testify. Proof must be corrected, late news waited for, accounts made up. Steele's business affairs required him to spend more time with Jacob junior than with the elder Tonson; and Steele may have preferred the company of the younger man, his contemporary.

Pope's claim¹⁷⁴ that Steele ended The Guardian because of a quarrel with Tonson and therefore turned to another publisher for The Englishman has been viewed with scepticism. It is more in accordance with Steele's well-known humanity to assume that he felt personally responsible when the printing of the Gazette was transferred from Jacob junior to Benjamin Tooke and John Barber in August, 1711, and preferred to spare Jacob junior further involvement in his own serious feud with the Tory ministry. The Tonsons had vainly sought Swift's intervention in their behalf. When this was not forthcoming, Steele wrote, likewise in vain, to James Brydges:

What I presume to trouble you now upon is in behalf of my friend Jacob Tonson Junr Printer of ye Gazette. There may be very good reason to remove a writer of that paper [Steele], that should not be altogether agreeable to ye Ministry, but that reason, methinks, cannot bear against ye Printer of it, who is mechanically to do what he is ordered. Mr Moore is ye person, who now presses hard in behalf of one Barber against Tonson. I believe you can persuade him to lay aside that application. If you please to speak to Mr Moore, or use any other method by speaking to Mr St John your self, you would oblige a very honest young man & do an act worthy yr own noble nature.¹⁷⁵

Not only for The Englishman, but also for the political tracts which followed it, with such serious reverses for himself, Steele employed other publishers until he could return to the Tonsons with a clear conscience after the accession of George I.

Steele's honors in the new reign were less substantial than he had hoped for, but they included a knighthood and a share in Drury Lane Theatre. In 1715 Tonson published a collected edition of The Political Writings of Sir Richard Steele, which Steele dedicated to the young Earl of Clare, soon to become Duke of Newcastle. That same year Tonson also published A Letter from the Earl of Mar to the King, Steele's attack on one of the leaders of the Jacobite rebellion in that year.

Steele dissipated his energies in the final, harassed years of his life. He edited briefly a number of journals of minor importance. He was plagued by debts, saddened by domestic griefs, deprived for a time of his post as comptroller of Drury Lane Theatre, and embittered by his quarrel with Addison. In 1719 he wrote angrily to Jacob junior, protesting against the separation of Addison's essays from his in Tickell's forthcoming edition of Addison's writings.¹⁷⁶ Steele had a further grievance against Tickell for excluding from Addison's collected Works (1721) The Drummer, which Steele had had Tonson publish for his friend, as Addison had requested. Jacob junior, who had given Steele fifty guineas for the anonymous play, believing it Addison's, now hastened to sell the copyright to another publisher, J. Darby, considering that Steele had misled him. In self-defense Steele sponsored a new edition of The Drummer, with a preface to Congreve, in which he reaffirmed Addison's authorship of the play and his own devotion to one who had exercised “such natural Power over me.”¹⁷⁷

Steele's last play, The Conscious Lovers (1723), was published by Jacob junior after his uncle's retirement. Steele dedicated the comedy to George I, from whom he received a gift of five hundred guineas. The play had an initial run of eighteen nights and two editions within a month of its first performance. Despite some comic episodes, The Conscious Lovers was a farewell to laughing comedy and was thus welcomed by Steele's contemporaries, who had rejected the values of the Restoration comic tradition. A long twilight in English comedy had begun.

Steele was the last survivor of the distinguished writers for whom Tonson became the regular publisher. Congreve, Addison, and Steele were all in their early twenties when Tonson's keen detective eye recognized their literary potentialities. It was Tonson who gave them their expanding reading public. In his late twenties Prior was the author of a few popular poems. Tonson made him more popular and published the authorized collected editions of Prior's verse. Where prodding was necessary, Tonson supplied it; his persuasive advertising was unfailing; and the respective interests of these gifted men, their publisher, and their readers were well served.

.....

EMINENT PUBLISHER

Tonson profited from the labors of his “eminent hands”; they profited, less tangibly, from the services of an “eminent publisher.” Tonson was discriminating. It was his ambition to follow in the footsteps of the best publishers who had preceded him, acquire, as opportunity afforded, the copyright of their best editions of ancient and modern authors, and surpass their achievement. Among his contemporaries, he published for gifted creative writers and reputable scholars. To be sure, for financial or political reasons he missed some of the prizes, notably masterpieces by Pope, Swift, and Defoe. But he frowned upon cheap editions of works devoid of any literary merit.

In a classically minded age, Tonson made a considerable contribution to classical translations and texts. There is every reason to suppose that he undertook a rigorous program of self-education. Tonson's chief rival in the publishing business, Bernard Lintot, cheerfully informed Pope that he had no knowledge of Greek, Latin, French, and Italian and had to employ correctors of unreliable translators and sometimes also call in “a civil customer” in his shop, “especially any Scotchman,” to help him correct a corrector.¹⁷⁸ Tonson required no such elaborate precautions. His taste was cosmopolitan, his knowledge of foreign languages adequate. He had the valuable advice of Dryden and established fruitful contacts with young scholars.

Tonson took great pride in handsome folio editions of classical authors. First among these was the 1693 translation of The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis … Together with the Satires of Aulus Persius Flaccus. As has been noted, Dryden edited this work. Also, he translated the first, third, sixth, tenth, and sixteenth satires of Juvenal and the six satires of Persius. Tonson had delayed publication so that Dryden could complete the translation of Persius himself, perhaps thereby increasing the prospect of a large sale.¹⁷⁹ The volume was printed on paper of the best quality, gilt-edged, with wide margins, and in large, clear type, and included Dryden's impressive introductory essay and notes for each satire.

Dryden supervised and corrected the translations of ten collaborators in Juvenal: his sons Charles (“Seventh Satire”) and John Dryden, Jr. (“Fourteenth Satire”), Nahum Tate (“Second” and “Fifteenth Satires”), William Bowles (“Fifth Satire”), George Stepney (“Eighth Satire”), Stephen Hervey (“Ninth Satire”), William Congreve (“Eleventh Satire”), Thomas Power (“Twelfth Satire”), Thomas Creech (“Thirteenth Satire”), and one anonymous contributor (Richard Duke) (“Fourth Satire”). With disarming modesty, Dryden ascribed “the better though not the greater part” of the translation to the work of assistants whose “Excellencies” must “attone for my Imperfections and those of my Sons.”¹⁸⁰ The assistants, some of whom were known to the public, shone, of course, in light reflected from their distinguished director. Tate was a dramatist and had recently been appointed Poet Laureate. Creech was admired as the translator of Lucretius. Stepney, whose contribution was his longest poem, was to prove a better diplomat than poet. Congreve, who translated the satire on “Gluttony,” was to become the most famous of the collaborators.

Dryden's translations, occupying more than a third of the volume, overshadow the others and admirably achieved the purpose he intended. He remarked in his prefatory essay that he and his assistants had undertaken “not a literal Translation but a kind of Paraphrase; or somewhat which is yet more loose betwixt a Paraphrase and Imitation.” He explained: “We write only for the Pleasure and Entertainment of those Gentlemen and Ladies, who tho they are not Scholars are not Ignorant: Persons of Understanding and good Sense; who not having made Latine Verse so much their business, as to be Critiques in it, wou'd be glad to find if the Wit of our Two great Authors, be answerable to their Fame and Reputation in the World.”¹⁸¹ Dryden conceded that the translators had made Juvenal “more Sounding, and more Elegant, than he was before in English,” and had “endeavour'd to make him speak that kind of English, which he wou'd have spoken had he liv'd in England, and had Written to this Age.” It must be admitted that “to speak sincerely, the Manners of Nations and Ages, are not to be confounded: We shou'd either make them English, or leave them Roman. If this can neither be defended, nor excus'd, let it be pardon'd, at least, because it is acknowledg'd; and so much the more easily, as being a fault which is never committed without some Pleasure to the Reader.”¹⁸²

Dryden's readers found his “more elegant” English very much to their taste. They could appreciate the vigorous antithesis and grace of such well-turned couplets as:

Look round the Habitable World, how few
Know their own Good, or knowing it, pursue.(183)

and

What Musick, or Enchanting Voice can chear
A Stupid, Old, Impenetrable Ear?(184)

or the description of a harlot:

She knows her Man, and when you Rant and Swear
Can draw you to her, with a single Hair.(185)

The greatest distinction of the Juvenal is Dryden's prefatory “Discourse concerning … Satire.” For the benefit of those who were neither scholars nor ignorant, Dryden provided brief, trenchant, illuminating comparisons of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius. He found Persius “not sometimes, but generally obscure”¹⁸⁶ but excelling, in his spirit of sincerity, Horace, “who is commonly in jeast and laughs while he instructs,” and equal to Juvenal, “who was as honest and serious as Persius, and more he cou'd not be.”¹⁸⁷ Juvenal was wholly employed in lashing vices, whereas ‘“Folly was the proper Quarry of Horace, and not Vice: And as there are but few Notoriously Wicked Men, in comparison with a Shoal of Fools, and Fops; so 'tis a harder thing to make a Man Wise, than to make him Honest: For the Will is only to be reclaim'd in the one; but the Understanding is to be inform'd in the other.”¹⁸⁸ The essay includes one of the finest passages of Dryden's incomparable prose:

I must confess, that the delight which Horace gives me, is but languishing. Be pleas'd still to understand, that I speak of my own Taste only: He may Ravish other Men; but I am too stupid and insensible, to be tickl'd. When he barely grins himself and, as Scaliger says, only shows his white Teeth, he cannot provoke me to any Laughter. His Urbanity, that is, his Good Manners, are to be commended, but his Wit is faint; and his Salt, if I may dare to say so, almost insipid. Juvenal is of a more vigorous and Masculine Wit, he gives as much Pleasure as I can bear: He fully satisfies my Expectation, he Treats his Subject home: His Spleen is rais'd, and he raises mine: I have the Pleasure of Concernment in all he says; He drives his Reader along with him: If he went another Stage, it wou'd be too far, it wou'd make a Journey of a Progress, and turn Delight into Fatigue. When he gives over, 'tis a sign the Subject is exhausted; and the Wit of Man can carry it no farther. If a fault can be justly found in him; 'tis that he is sometimes too luxuriant, too redundant; says more than he needs … but never more than pleases. Add to this, that his Thoughts are as just as those of Horace and much more Elevated.¹⁸⁹

Dryden's Juvenal had been the first folio edition of the Latin poet to be published for twenty years. A second edition in 1697 was illustrated with engravings by the Dutch artist Michael Van der Gucht. The continuing popularity of the translation is attested by the fact that Tonson printed a fifth edition in 1713.

The Works of Virgil was a far more ambitious undertaking than Juvenal for both Dryden as translator and Tonson as publisher. As he proceeded with the translation, Dryden found it increasingly burdensome. He complained: “Virgil called upon me in every line for some new word; and I paid so long, that I was almost bankrupt … the twelfth Aeneid cost me double the time of the first and second.”¹⁹⁰ Of the completed work, however, he could feel that in spite of declining years, poverty, illness, and judges prejudiced against him, he had “in some measure” acquitted himself of “the Debt which I ow'd the Publick, when I undertook this Work.”¹⁹¹ The publication was welcomed with enthusiasm. On September 30, 1696, Basil Kennett wrote to Tonson: “It's ye best News in ye world that your great Friend is so near the height of his glory: when 'twill be as impossible to think of Virgil without Mr Dryden as of either without Mr Tonson.”¹⁹²

The very great success of Virgil, Dryden remarked, was “beyond its desert or my Expectation.”¹⁹³ The translation superseded Ogilby's Virgil, which for nearly half a century had been much admired by English readers. Dryden's version “still has more vitality,”¹⁹⁴ it has been justly observed, than any other translation of Virgil. “Whatever may be our opinion of Dryden's Virgil as a translation,” comments one modern critic, “we must admit that it is a splendid example of the possibilities of the heroic couplet.”¹⁹⁵ The “choice of words and Harmony of Numbers” which Dryden considered his chief contribution to English poetry is abundantly illustrated in the lays of shepherds and their loves in the “Pastorals,” the glowing descriptions of the pursuits of a country life in the “Georgics,” and the stately, dramatic narrative of “the long Glories of Majestic Rome” in the “Aeneis.”

Tonson considered that so important a work as Dryden's Virgil merited a subscription edition on an unprecedented scale. One hundred first subscribers paid five guineas apiece to have their names, titles, and coats of arms conspicuously printed beneath the elaborate “sculptures” or “cuts.” Among the first subscribers were Princess Anne, Prince George of Denmark, and the boy Duke of Gloucester; numerous noblemen; and such high-ranking statesmen as Somers, Lord Chancellor; the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Privy Seal; and Sir William Trumbull, Principal Secretary of State. Second subscribers, who paid two guineas apiece, included Congreve and his friends Joseph Keally and Charles Mein, and the theatrical celebrities Thomas Betterton, Elizabeth Barry, and Anne Bracegirdle.

Tonson found it convenient to use again the “sculptures” that had been used in Ogilby's 1654 edition of Virgil. He probably concluded that they were too good to be laid aside and that having new ones made would lessen his profits. Besides, they had been generally admired and had increased the popularity of Ogilby's accurate but uninspired translation. Franz Cleyn, a native of Germany, had designed these illustrations. Cleyn had been employed by Charles I and various members of the nobility and, like other skilled draughtsmen, had sought employment by publishers after the decline of Court patronage. He had designed and manufactured famous tapestries, and his designs have a tapestried effect in their heavy foliaged, side-framing trees with finely shaded leaves.¹⁹⁶ Cleyn's designs for Virgil had been engraved mainly by Wenceslaus Hollar, a Czech émigré, who had been scenographer to Charles II, and Pierre Lombart, an accomplished French engraver.

The illustrations for the “Pastorals” and “Goergics” have similar but pleasant extensive landscapes, often with hills or classical buildings in the distance, and in the foreground shepherds and other rustic swains. Many scenes are enlivened by animals, faithfully and humorously depicted, an inquiring cow, a smiling dog, charging bulls, or horses joyously tossing their manes. The “Aeneis” had offered Cleyn such dramatic possibilities as a violent storm and shipwreck; the torment of Laöcoon; the Trojan horse disgorging warriors; Aeneas escaping with his father and son from flaming Troy; a naval battle; war games (utilized by Tonson to divert the young Duke of Gloucester); and ghosts and monsters in hell.

Dryden's Virgil was printed, as Juvenal had been, on paper of the best quality, with large type, and with generous margins which were not cluttered, like those in Ogilby's 1654 edition, with notes. Tonson made certain significant changes in the illustrations. A new frontispiece by Michael Van der Gucht represented Virgil in flowing robes, holding in his hands Dryden's volume, with the Muse about to place a laurel wreath on the poet's head and a winged cupid, poised above, bearing a laurel-wreathed medallion conspicuously inscribed: Dryden's Virgil. Printed for Jacob Tonson. The other changes were more subtle but unmistakable. In most of the illustrations not only is the straight nose of Ogilby's Aeneas replaced by a hooked one, strongly suggestive of the shape of King William's, but long lines on either side of his face give Virgil's hero an older, sterner expression.

Ogilby had published five editions of Virgil within a period of thirty-five years. Tonson published four editions within nineteen years. His nephew was to publish a fifth and sixth edition, and a seventh was published by the sons of Jacob junior, Jacob and Richard Tonson, and Samuel Draper. Editions of Dryden's text by other publishers continued to appear up to 1880.

A still more imposing subscription edition was Tonson's Latin text, C. Julii Caesaris Quae Extant (1712), which had been so eagerly awaited during the nine years since Tonson began preparations to publish it. Addison was probably not the only one of Tonson's “eminent hands” who considered that Tonson's Caesar might be “the noblest Volume that ever came from the English press.”¹⁹⁷ As his editor Tonson had chosen a well-known English metaphysician, Samuel Clarke, rector of St. Benet's in London and one of Queen Anne's chaplains in ordinary. Clarke's scholarship had attracted attention in his undergraduate days in Cambridge, where he was known as “the lad of Caius.” Tonson was also fortunate in his printer, John Watts,¹⁹⁸ who was soon to serve him as printing partner in a series of classical texts.

C. Julii Caesaris Quae Extant is an enormous folio, profusely illustrated. In a double-page frontispiece, engraved by Cornelis Huyberts, against a background of Roman buildings, muscular cupids in mid-air hold a medallion with a bust of Caesar above a seated female figure, attended by a cupid holding a sceptre and the Muse blowing a trumpet. Under the Latin title the publisher's name, “Jacob Tonson, 1712,” stands out boldly in English. The volume was dedicated to Marlborough, whose portrait by Kneller precedes the Dedication. On each of the double or single page plates appears the name with the coats of arms of the subscriber, with the inscription, Hac Tabula humillime Diccata est. Headpieces, tailpieces, and ingeniously decorated initial capitals supply further embellishments. Tonson's Caesar was praised by an English bibliographer of the nineteenth century, William Lowndes, as “the most sumptuous classical work which this country has produced.”¹⁹⁹

The eighty-seven engravings were the work of Dutch artists, chiefly: Cornelis Huyberts, Bastiaen Stoopendael, Jan de Leeuw, and Andries Van Buysen, and were suited to the subject-matter of the five Commentaries. The scenes most frequently represented are extensive landscapes, terminated by towering mountains. Rivers wind to the sea through plains where a few walled towns and encampments are located. The foreground provides side-framing trees with luxuriant foliage, shading resting warriors. Everywhere there is precise and exquisite detail: in every leaf of the trees, every curl of a horse's mane, in the foreground; and in the clustered houses of the towns, the ships at sea, and the tiny figures of individual horsemen in the middle ground. The maps display meticulous workmanship.

A unique engraving, which Tonson had taken unusual pains to acquire, is of the bison belonging to Frederick I, King of Prussia. The engraving is dedicated to Frederick William, Prince of Brandenburg, who was soon to succeed his father. The figure of the black, plump animal, with nicely shaded hide and long tail spread against a tree, completely fills two folio pages. In profile the bison's large round eye has a genial expression, and he raises his forefeet obligingly, as if to avoid crushing a small horse and an antlered stag in a pastoral middle ground glimpsed between his legs. One of the most carefully executed engravings is of the city of Alexandria and its harbor. One of the most gruesome represents a giant wooden cage, with large numbers of agonized captives leaning from it to view the fire prepared below to burn them. The final illustrations are Huybert's engravings of the nine famous paintings of “The Triumph of Caesar” by the Italian artist, Andrea Mantegna. The first in the series was dedicated to Somerset, the ninth to Somers.

Eighteenth-century readers became familiar with and presumably admired the many attractive duodecimo volumes of the Greek and Latin texts of Maittaire's Classics, published by Jacob Tonson and John Watts between 1713 and 1719. In 1713 Queen Anne, recognizing the labor and expense involved in such an enterprise, granted “to Michael Maittaire, his executors, administrators and assigns” her royal license for the sole printing and publishing of a collection of all the Greek and Latin authors “in twelves,” with complete indexes, “for the Term of Fourteen Years.”²⁰⁰ Again Tonson selected with care an editor who, if somewhat pedestrian, had “a large measure of Scholarship.”²⁰¹ Maittaire, the son of a French Protestant émigré, had had an exceptionally long apprenticeship in the study of Greek and Latin authors under the formidable Dr. Busby of Westminster School. For the use of Westminster students Maittaire compiled his Graecae Linguae Dialecti (1706) and an English Grammar (1712), and he was for a time second master at the school. It may be inferred that Maittaire's long-continued services to Tonson were more profitable to Tonson than to his hard-working editor. Maittaire wrote an urgent letter to Tonson in 1717 requesting an advance of money for editions of the Greek poets and Cicero and offering to supply several other texts which were “much in request.” “My pressing necessities,” wrote Maittaire, “are impatient for an answer. Were I not press'd to it, I would never put my modesty to the wrack in discovering my wants.”²⁰²

Maittaire's “very curious and correct” editions of Terence, Lucretius, Justin, Phaedrus, Aesop, Salust, and Pompey were printed in 1713. In April, 1714, Tonson announced that “the collection will be made compleat with all convenient speed.”²⁰³The New Testament in Greek was printed in 1714; Horace, Florus, Ovid in three volumes, Virgil, Nepos, and Catullus followed in 1715; Caesar, Rufus, Juvenal and Persius, and Martial in 1716; Paterculus in 1718; and Lucan in 1719.

The small, gilt-edged books were uniform in format, on good paper but with fine print, with title pages lettered in black and red. The French artist Louis du Guernier designed and engraved most of the frontispieces, headpieces, and tailpieces. A favorite tailpiece featured Cupid on a cloud blowing a trumpet. A favorite headpiece represented small cupids equipped with bows and arrows, surrounding a fountain. The scholarly indexes were a third as long as the text, or longer.

It is not surprising that Tonson concluded his editions of classical authors with a sumptuous edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses in Fifteen Books. Translated by the most Eminent Hands. In 1626 George Sandys had published his translation of this work in a small volume which at once became popular in Court circles, followed in 1632 by a large folio edition, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd and Represented in Figures. The 1632 volume, printed on very fine paper with neat print, large margins, marginal notes, and notes at the end of each book, has been described as “one of the handsome books of English Renaissance printing.”²⁰⁴ Franz Cleyn designed the fifteen copper plate illustrations prefacing the various books and providing a pictorial summary of the subject matter. Ten editions had appeared by the end of the century. Dryden, who had read Sandys's translation in boyhood, was originally critical of Sandys as a poet but ultimately praised him as “the best versifier of the former age.”²⁰⁵

In 1678, at the beginning of Tonson's publishing career, George Sawbridge, who had sometimes published with Thomas Basset and whom Tonson as a young apprentice had known and admired, brought out the seventh edition of Sandys's Ovid. Gradually, as his publishing career advanced, Tonson had printed portions of the Metamorphoses translated by his eminent hands.²⁰⁶ A considerable part of the contents of Tonson's 1717 edition was already available when Tonson chose Garth to find other assistants for the remaining portions and to edit the work as a whole.

Pope satirized Garth's editorial labors in “Sandys' Ghost: Or a Proper New Ballad On the New Ovid's Metamorphosis: As it was intended to be Translated by Persons of Quality.” In “dead of night” the ghost of Sandys, “with saucer Eyes of Fire,” pays a visit to “a Wit and courtly 'Squire,” bringing ominous news:

I hear the Beat of Jacob's Drums,
                    Poor Ovid finds no Quarter!
See first the merry P[elham] comes
                    In haste, without his Garter.
Then Lords and Lordings, Squires and Knights,
                    Wits, Witlings, Prigs, and Peers;
G[ar]th at St. James's, and at White's
                    Beats up for Volunteers.

Fenton, Gay, Congreve, Rowe, and Stanyan have refused to participate in the work, but “any one” may contribute to it. The publisher is advised:

Now, Tonson list thy Forces all,
                    Review them, and tell Noses;
For to poor Ovid shall befal
                    A strange Metamorphosis.

The dire consequence of Garth's undertaking will be the change of Ovid into waste paper.²⁰⁷

Pope took some satirical liberties in his ballad, for Gay, Congreve, Rowe, and Temple Stanyan all contributed to the new translation. Dryden's share, culled from his previous works, was the most substantial, comprising all of Books I and XII and episodes from six other books. Joseph Addison was represented by Books II and III; Samuel Croxall by Book VI and episodes from four other books; Samuel Garth by Book XIV and one other episode; Arthur Mainwaring by Book V; Laurence Eusden by most of Book IV; Nahum Tate by most of Book VII; John Gay by nine episodes; Thomas Vernon by five; Leonard Welsted by four; Alexander Catcott by two; William Congreve by one and part of another; and Alexander Pope, Nicholas Rowe, Temple Stanyan, Stephen Hervey, William Stonestreet, and John Ozell by one each. Pope would scarcely have thought of himself as among such minor contributors as might properly be considered “any one.”

Garth dedicated this volume to Princess Caroline, Princess of Wales, whose interest in literature was one agreeable compensation for the accession of George I. The portrait of the Princess by Kneller appeared as a frontispiece; and as a pleasant innovation the fifteen books were dedicated to fifteen ladies, most of them titled, whose coats of arms were engraved beneath their names. The engravings, by Louis du Guernier, Michael Van der Gucht, Elisha Kirkall, and R. Smith, presented crowded scenes of the ingeniously contrived transformations of mortals and gods by divine magic. The aim of the translators, announced in the Preface, was to copy the beauties of Ovid and “throw a shade” over his imperfections. So composite a work naturally suffered from the poetical limitations of some of Garth's recruits. But with the advantage of an elaborate format and several famous “hands” among the contributors, Tonson's Ovid was well received and had several editions up to 1826.

In publishing monumental editions of the works of classical authors, Tonson was following the example of his most significant precursors in the publishing business. In rescuing from obscurity or oblivion the masterpieces of English authors and publishing them with similar care, he was an innovator. His first and best triumph in this neglected field was the fourth edition of Milton's Paradise Lost, which Tonson published with Bentley in 1688. The works of Milton were to bring Tonson more recognition and greater financial returns than any other publishing ventures. Years later, when Tonson was asked what poet he had got most by, he replied unhesitatingly: “Milton.”²⁰⁸

The sales of earlier editions of the epic had not been reassuring. As is well known, Milton had not fared well with his publisher, Samuel Simmons, to whom in 1667 he sold the copyright of Paradise Lost for £5, on the understanding that he would receive £5 more when thirteen hundred copies of the first edition had been sold; £5 more after the sale of the same number of copies of the second edition; and another £5 after the same sale of the third. No edition was to exceed fifteen hundred copies. Simmons published the second edition in 1674, the third in 1678. In 1680 Milton's widow was quite content to resign for a total payment of £8 the £5 due her for the second edition and the £5 not yet due on the third. Soon afterward Simmons was equally willing to sell his copyright to Brabazon Aylmer for £25, but Aylmer showed no interest in attempting another edition. For ten years there was no new edition of the poem.

The first edition of Paradise Lost, with the text in ten books, was a modest small quarto which sold for three shillings a copy. The paper is yellowish but good, with the lines close together, the margins narrow. The headpieces and decorative initial capital letters are attractive. The pages are not numbered, but the lines are numbered in tens. A comparison of the text with Milton's manuscript of Book I²⁰⁹ indicates accuracy in printing. The second edition, a small octavo, with the text arranged in twelve books, is rather less attractive than the first but has a portrait of Milton and commendatory verses, and the pages are numbered. The third edition, another small octavo, was modeled on the second, with poorer paper and type sometimes blurred. In the same year in which the third edition was printed, Thomas Rymer wrote scornfully of “that Paradise Lost of Milton's which some are pleased to call a poem.”²¹⁰ Dryden judged otherwise. He is said to have returned a copy of the poem which Dorset loaned him with the comment: “This man cuts us all out and the Ancients too.”²¹¹

When Tonson acquired the copyright of Paradise Lost, Aylmer sent him Milton's manuscript of the poem and also the manuscript of Milton's contract with Simmons. Tonson carefully preserved the manuscript of Book I and the contract, and these documents remained in the possession of his nephew's heirs. The subsequent history of the contract is curious. At the death of Tonson's great-nephew, Jacob Tonson the third, many papers connected with the Tonson publishing firm were stored in the cellars of a house in the Strand which the great-nephew had owned and which became the property of Mr. Hodsoll, a banker. Clerks of the banking house with an interest in literature apparently raided the papers, some were removed, and the remainder were ultimately destroyed. Milton's contract with Simmons and some other documents were left by a lodger, in lieu of rent, with his landlord in Clifford Road, Bond Street, and were sold by the landlord to a bookseller. In 1831 the Milton-Simmons contract was purchased for £50 by Samuel Rogers, the poet, who gave it to the British Museum.²¹²

The frontispiece chosen by Tonson and Bentley for the 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost was an engraving of Milton in an oval frame by the mezzotint engraver Robert White, and beneath it was printed (without Dryden's name) Dryden's tribute to Milton:

Three Poets, in three distant Ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpass'd,
The next in Majesty; in both the Last.
The force of Nature cou'd no farther goe:
To make a Third she joynd the former two.

As it seemed advisable to apologize for a poem written in blank verse, rather than in the popular form of heroic couplets, a statement entitled “The Verse” occurs on a separate page after the title page. The reading public is advised that “the neglect of rime is not to be taken as a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers.”

The 1688 edition, in the style of all of Tonson's more elaborate books, was distinguished by excellent paper, large, clear type, and ample margins. It was the first illustrated edition of Milton. A Spanish artist, John Baptist Medina, who had recently come to England, designed the “sculptures,” eight of which were engraved by Michael Burghers, a Dutch engraver who had settled in Oxford. The illustrations conformed to popular taste for a prettified, pictorial representation of Milton's majestic poem. The most striking scene reveals a grotesque winged Satan rising from the flames of the burning lake, where his followers are confined. In these engravings foreground, middle ground, background, and the heavens above are well occupied, the device of “multiple staging” making possible an array of several episodes at the same time in various portions of the scene. In the engraving for Book XI Michael addresses a distracted Adam and Eve in the foreground; and in the distance Eve is seen asleep, Adam talks with Michael on a hill, a lion pursues a hart and hind, and an eagle swoops from the sky to his prey.

Also in 1688 Randal Taylor published in separate volumes Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. In 1691 Bentley and Tonson brought out a fifth edition of Paradise Lost, which was reissued in 1692 under Tonson's name alone. Meanwhile, Tonson had succeeded in acquiring the copyright for Milton's other poems. In 1695 Tonson published The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton. Containing Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain'd, Sampson Agonistes, and his Poems on Several Occasions. Together with Explanatory Notes on each Book of the Paradise Lost and a Table never before Printed. The commentary on Paradise Lost in this edition was the first which Milton had received and was the work of “P. H.” (Patrick Hume). In 321 pages, this Scottish scholar learnedly annotated Biblical references, noted classical parallels, and clarified obscure words and phrases. It has been claimed that all subsequent editors have been indebted to Hume's commentary, “and often with far too little acknowledgment.”²¹³

In 1705 and 1707 Tonson published editions of The Poetical Works in two volumes. In 1711 he published a pocket edition of Paradise Lost only, which he dedicated to Somers with commendable brevity in the following words:

My Lord,

It was Your Lordship's Opinion and Encouragement that occasion'd the first appearing of this Poem in the Folio Edition, which from thence has been so well receiv'd, that notwithstanding the Price of it was Four times greater than before, the Sale encreas'd double the Number every Year. The Work is now generally known and esteem'd; and I having the Honour to hear Your Lordship say, that a smaller Edition of it would be grateful to the World, immediately resolv'd upon Printing it in this Volume, of which I most humbly beg your Acceptance, from / My Lord / Your Lordship's / Ever Obliged Servant.²¹⁴

The successful editions of Milton may have encouraged Tonson to launch a much-needed new edition of Shakespeare. Between the fourth edition of Shakespeare's plays, published by Henry Herringman, A. Brewster, and R. Bentley in 1685, and the edition published by Tonson in six volumes in 1709, nearly a quarter of a century had elapsed. The Fourth Folio text was rare and expensive, and it was highly desirable that readers should be able to purchase all of the plays in more convenient volumes and at moderate cost. Again, Tonson succeeded in acquiring an important copyright. As editor of The Works of Mr. William Shakespear Tonson wisely chose a capable dramatist, Nicholas Rowe, who was a less prejudiced critic of Shakespeare than many of his contemporaries.

The frontispiece of the first volume of the new edition had an inset of Shakespeare's portrait engraved by Michael Van der Gucht, and each play was preceded by an engraving representing some phase of the action. The illustrations were adapted, as much as possible, to the manners of Rowe's time. Thus, the setting for A Midsummer Night's Dream shows two groups of eighteenth-century courtiers meeting by a stream in a moonlit pastoral scene; in the forest of Arden in As You Like It the bewigged gentlemen masquerading as courtiers strut about in high-heeled shoes; and the Queen and Hamlet in the ghost scene in Hamlet are attired as they would have been at the Court of Queen Anne.

Rowe dedicated “the best of our Poets to the Protection of the best Patron,” the Duke of Somerset. He explained in his Dedication that in an endeavor to redeem Shakespeare “from the Injuries of former Impressions,” he had compared earlier editions in order to secure “the true Reading” and had supplied many missing lines, as “in Hamlet one whole scene,” left out in the last edition. “Such as it is,” Rowe remarked modestly, “it is the best Present of English Poetry I am capable of making your Grace.”²¹⁵

A fairly long essay, “Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear,” preceded the plays. Rowe's was the first biographical account of Shakespeare and was reprinted by all other eighteenth-century editors of the dramatist. Inadequate though it was, it incorporated all that “tradition, then almost expiring, could supply.”²¹⁶ Johnson included it in his own edition of Shakespeare, commenting, “it relates … what is now to be known, and therefore deserves to pass through all succeeding publications.”²¹⁷ Not only was Rowe's “Account” the first biography of Shakespeare; it was “the standard biography till the time of Malone.”²¹⁸ As to the chronology of the plays, Rowe candidly confessed that he was in the dark.

Rowe felt the necessity of defending Shakespeare from such “severe remarks” as the strictures of Rymer.²¹⁹ With noteworthy enthusiasm, in view of the veneration for classical conventions then prevailing and his adherence to them in his own plays, Rowe acclaimed Shakespeare's irregular genius:

Whether his Ignorance of the Antients were a disadvantage to him or no, may admit of a Dispute: For tho' the knowledge of 'em might have made him more Correct, yet it is not improbable but that the Regularity and Deference for them, which would have attended that Correctness, might have restrain'd some of that Fire, Impetuosity, and even beautiful Extravagance which we admire in Shakespear: And I believe we are better pleas'd with those Thoughts, altogether New and Uncommon which his own Imagination supply'd him so abundantly with, than if he had given us the most beautiful Passages out of the Greek and Latin Poets, and that in the most agreeable manner that it was possible for a Master of the English language to deliver 'em.²²⁰

Rowe's observations on individual plays reflect his personal taste. He commended Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello for having a fable founded on one action. His enjoyment of sentiment led him to pronounce Romeo and Juliet “wonderfully Tender and Passionate in the Love-Part, and very Pitiful in the Distress.”²²¹ He had high praise for that “lewd old Fellow,”²²² Falstaff, found Shakespeare's clowns “all very entertaining,”²²³ and considered Caliban an example of “wonderful Invention.”²²⁴ Rowe concluded that “no Dramatick Writer ever succeeded better in raising Terror in the Minds of an Audience than Shakespear has done.”²²⁵

Rowe's was the first serious attempt to edit Shakespeare's plays. He modernized spelling and corrected punctuation. Himself a dramatist, for the first time Rowe provided a list of characters for each play, divided and numbered acts and scenes “on rational principles,” and added stage directions. Basing his text on the Fourth Folio, he occasionally consulted the First or Second Folio in order to clarify certain passages. He made emendations, “without the pomp of notes or boasts of criticism,”²²⁶ of which “some are right, some are plausible, some are wrong.”²²⁷ Many of his emendations succeeding editors “received without acknowledgment.”²²⁸ Unfortunately, Rowe's sixth volume included the six spurious plays which had been retained in the Fourth Folio.²²⁹

In the same month in which Tonson published Shakespeare's plays, Curll advertised as nearly ready a seventh volume of Shakespeare's works, containing his poems and critical notes on all the plays, and offered “a Gratification from J. Baker at the Black Boy in Pater-Noster-Row” to any gentleman who could contribute anything to improve the notes.²³⁰ A few weeks later, the volume of poems duly appeared, published by E. Curll and E. Sanger, and advertised as “printed exactly as the Plays, and some on large Paper to compleat Sets.”²³¹ For this volume Charles Gildon supplied “An Essay on the … Stage” and “Remarks on the Plays of Shakespear,” with critical comments considerably less enlightened than Rowe's. Gildon did point out, however, that there was “not the least Ground”²³² to consider the last six plays in Tonson's edition genuine and alleged that the bookseller (Tonson) who printed them had included them “according to the laudable Custom of the Trade to swell the Volume and the Price.” Furthermore, that same bookseller, “out of a good-natur'd Principle, agreeable to the Man, … thought it not impolitic to lessen the Towns Expectation of these Poems, because he had no hand in their Publication.”²³³

It was characteristic of Tonson that he ignored this attack and joined forces with Curll in the complete and improved edition of Shakespeare published in 1714 by J. Tonson, E. Curll, J. Pemberton, and K. Sanger. This edition was in nine duodecimo volumes, consisting of Rowe's Preface and the plays edited by him in eight volumes, and the poems, with Gildon's essays and a glossary, in the ninth. Tonson paid “Mr. Hughes” (John Hughes) £28 7s. for what appears to have been substantial work by him on this edition. It is not known to what extent Rowe shared in the work of revision. Rowe had received from Tonson £36 10s. for his previous editorial labors on Shakespeare.²³⁴

Jacob Tonson was again successful in obtaining the copyright of Spenser's Works, which had not been published since the third edition of 1679. In 1715 Tonson printed in an octavo edition The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser. In Six Volumes. With a Glossary Explaining the Old and Obscure Words. Publish'd by Mr. Hughes. Perhaps Somers, who had urged Tonson to publish Milton, had proposed that Tonson should render a similar service to Spenser. In any case, Hughes dedicated these volumes to Somers, in the last year of Somers's life. “It was your Lordship's encouraging a beautiful Edition of Paradise Lost,” wrote Hughes, “that first brought that incomparable poem to be generally known and esteem'd.” Somers was “one of the greatest Statesmen the Age has produc'd,” who had “a more than common Share” in obtaining the Settlement. Now, “even in your greatest Retirement, you can never be wholly hid from the Eyes of a People, to whom you have done so much good.”²³⁵

In the 1715 edition all of Spenser's poems and his treatise, “A View of the State of Ireland,” were included. One printing was on royal paper for subscribers, whose names were listed. Spenser's text was in rather small print, the accompanying essays in large print. The pictorial quality of the poems supplied du Guernier, who designed and engraved the illustrations, with varied opportunities for groups of graceful figures against a more-or-less Roman background.

John Hughes, a minor poet, as well as a painter and musician, was well chosen as editor. Hughes was an able, if not scholarly, critic and an admirer of Spenser in an age which had shown little interest in the Elizabethan poet. Hughes had consulted earlier editions, including some early quartos of the minor poems, corrected some errors, followed Spenser's spelling, as he said, “for the most part,” and provided a moderately satisfactory glossary. He supplied four very readable essays, “The Life of Mr. Edmund Spenser,” “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry,” “Remarks on the Fairy Queen,” and “Remarks on The Shepherd's Calendar &c.”

Hughes could give only a slender account of Spenser's life, but he had been at some pains to secure as much information as possible. He included a pleasant anecdote of Sir Philip Sidney's bounty to Spenser after reading the ninth canto of the first book of The Faerie Queene and referred to Congreve's efforts in behalf of a descendant of the poet. In “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry” Hughes praised the “extraordinary native Strength” of both Chaucer and Spenser, which had made it possible for them to take “deep Root, like old British Oaks,”²³⁶ despite their archaic language. Since the critics had not been concerned with making rules about allegorical poetry, Hughes made his own and claimed that Spenser fully satisfies the requirements of liveliness, elegance, consistency, and clarity. Hughes was courageous enough to take issue with Sir William Temple, who had declared Spenser's moral “so bare that it lost the Effect.” “I do not understand this,” confessed Hughes. “A Moral which is not clear, is in my Apprehension next to no Moral at all.”²³⁷ In his praise of The Shepheardes Calender Hughes reveals his delight in pastoral poetry, a taste which he shared with his contemporaries and for one of the same reasons, that “it is a wonderful Amusement to the Imagination, to be sometimes transported, as it were, out of modern life.”²³⁸

In “Remarks on the Fairy Queen” Hughes offers sound, perceptive, and even romantic criticism of Spenser's masterpiece.

The chief Merit of this Poem consists in that surprizing Vein of fabulous Invention which runs thro it, and enriches it every where with Imagery and Descriptions more than we meet with in any other modern Poem. The Author seems to be possess'd of a kind of Poetical Magick; and the Figures he calls up to our View rise so thick upon us, that we are at once pleased and distracted by the exhaustless Variety of them; so that his Faults may in a manner be imputed to his Excellencies: His Abundance betrays him into Excess, and his Judgment is overborne by the Torrent of his Imagination.²³⁹

Hughes noted some defects of the poem and, like his contemporaries, had reservations about the Spenserian stanza, although he found Spenser's diction “for the most part, strong, significant and harmonious.” He chose excellent illustrations of the “Beauties” which abound in every canto of each book. In one important respect he was far in advance of contemporary criticism. Admitting that The Faerie Queene lacks unity of design, Hughes refused to consider this a fatal blemish. Spenser never intended to design his poem by the rules of Homer and Virgil, and to compare it with the models of antiquity would be like drawing a parallel between Roman and Gothic architecture. “There is a Bent in Nature, which is apt to determine Men the particular way in which they are most capable of excelling; and tho it is certain he [Spenser] might have form'd a better Plan, it is to be question'd whether he cou'd have executed any other so well.”²⁴⁰

One more de luxe edition was published by Tonson, this time of the Works of the popular contemporary poet, Matthew Prior. The enterprise was not initiated by Tonson but was promoted as “a piece of friendship” by a group of Prior's friends to relieve Matt's straitened circumstances after the dismal end of his diplomatic career. Backed by influential supporters and widely advertised, the project attracted unusual attention, with gratifying results.

One evening in January, 1717, Earl Bathurst and Lord Edward Harley, son of the Earl of Oxford, met at the house of Erasmus Lewis, with Prior, Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot also present. While the others were discussing a subscription edition of Prior's poems, Lewis wrote a letter to Swift, requesting him to solicit Irish subscriptions. It was decided that subscribers should pay one guinea in advance and another on receiving the book.²⁴¹ Swift exerted himself and ultimately secured seventy subscriptions, and the task slowly got under way. On one occasion, Prior invited Pope to come to his house to meet Erasmus Lewis there and “confer upon the premises” with Jacob Tonson concerning the proposed publication.²⁴²

Prior had a grandiose scheme for the new edition, not all of the details of which could be realized. He longed to have his poems printed on vellum and reluctantly accepted the verdict that this would be “impracticable, improbable, impossible.” But he was able to assure Lord Harley that “paper imperial, the largest in England,” would be used; and Tonson and Adrian Drift, Prior's secretary, managed to arrange for a frontispiece “as big as has been formed since the days of Alexander the Coppersmith.”²⁴³ Prior devoted the greater part of 1718 to personal supervision of the edition. He sought the advice of Humfrey Wanley, the Earl of Oxford's “library-keeper,” consulting him about the use of capital letters for “Emphatical words” and other matters, and sending him sheets for inspection. Wanley abetted Prior in protesting to the printer about “filthy hooks, meagre letters and unequal lines.”²⁴⁴ Prior wrote to Swift that he employed “two colon and comma men” to help him with corrections, and he designed himself with meticulous care such emblems as “cupids, torches, and hearts” for initial capital letters.²⁴⁵ Despite his complaints and denials, Prior rejoiced in a labor very close to his heart. “A pretty kind of amusement,” he jested, “I have engaged in: commas, semicolons, italics, and capitals, to make nonsense more pompous, and furbelow bad poetry with good printing.”²⁴⁶

Poems on Several Occasions was published in three sizes in December, 1718, without Prior's name, by Jacob Tonson and John Barber. There were 1,447 subscribers, a list of whose names precedes the poems. Several subscribers ordered ten copies and a considerable number, five. Nearly all of the eminent persons of the time subscribed. Prior was to bequeath one copy of extra large size to St. John's College, Cambridge, of which he had been a fellow.

There is no reason to suppose that the subscribers objected to the massiveness of their purchase. But a small spurious edition of Prior's poems, published by T. Johnson in 1720, was launched with the following artful and double-barrelled attack on Tonson by its publisher:

Mr. Prior's Poems are generally & most deservedly esteemed; but every one cannot spare a Guiney to buy the folio Edition. beside that its bulk makes it unfit to carry about either in Town or Country; which yet one would be desirous to doe, because many of his pieces are so pretty & diverting. So this Edition will please as well those that have the large Edition [Tonson's], as those that have it not; & the character, besides its beauty & neatness, is large enough to be read by old people as well as young; whereas the pocket Editions we have lately had of Waller, Milton, Hudibras & others [Tonson's] are printed on so small a letter, that they cannot be read by any one above forty, without great pain & fatigue to the eyes, which every wise man will shun as much as possible.

The unauthorized publisher concluded with an air of scrupulous veracity: “There has been some more pieces attributed to Mr. Prior, but I believe, without reason, since he has given in this Collection all that he has written in this kind worth publishing under his name; & in my opinion, 'tis a great fault to print under a man's name any thing that he disowns, whether good or bad.”²⁴⁷

Prior included in the 1718 edition all of the poems he had printed thus far²⁴⁸ which he wished preserved in his name. It was not a large collection, although substantially increased by two long poems, “Solomon,” which Prior liked better than his friends did, and “Alma,” with which he had beguiled his imprisonment. Although Prior was sometimes at odds with Tonson, he referred goodhumoredly to his publisher near the beginning of “Alma”:

Ratts half the manuscript have eat:
Dire Hunger! which We still regret:
O! may they ne'er again digest
The Horrors of so sad a Feast.
Yet less our Grief, if what remains,
Dear Jacob, by thy Care and Pains
Shall be to future Times convey'd.(249)

In the Preface to “Solomon” Prior made a significant and forward-looking, if somewhat hesitant, attack on the heroic couplet, which he had employed ad nauseam in that tedious poem:

If striking out into Blank Verse, as Milton did (and in this kind Mr. Philipps, had He lived, would have excelled) or running the Thought into Alternate and Stanza, which allows a greater Variety, and still preserves the Dignity of the Verse; as Spenser and Fairfax have done; If either of these, I say, be a proper Remedy for my Poetical Complaint, or if any other may be found, I dare not determine: I am only enquiring, in order to be better informed; without presuming to direct the Judgment of Others. … But once more; He that writes in Rhimes, dances in Fetters: And as his Chain is more extended, he may certainly take longer steps.²⁵⁰

Prior's fastidious and constant supervision contributed to making this perhaps the most attractive of Tonson's illustrated editions. There is a singular charm in Prior's designs for initial capitals, as of a tiny cupid enclosed in the letter Q, or bearing a trumpet and peeping from the letter T. The French artist, Louis Chéron, designed the numerous headpieces and tailpieces. Graceful scrolls frame figures in classical draperies, or kneeling cupids, or boys supporting garlands. Some of the shorter poems have dainty miniature tailpieces. Prior chose to adorn with the most elaborate of the tail-pieces his unfinished “An Epistle, Desiring the Queen's Picture. Written at Paris, 1714. But left unfinish'd, by the Sudden News of Her Majesty's Death.” The poem breaks off in the middle of a line. With his diplomatic career shattered by the death of the Queen, Prior could only offer to the memory of “my bright Defender” the final tribute of an eloquent silence and a vision of a beautiful Pegasus in flight, looking wistfully back at a seated Muse.

The ostentation upon which Prior insisted, and of which his contemporaries apparently approved, was gently and delightfully ridiculed by Austin Dobson many years later:

With the small copy of 1718, Johnson might have knocked down Osborne the bookseller; with the same work in its tallest form (for there were three issues), Osborne the bookseller might have laid prostrate “the great Lexicographer” himself. It is, of a surety, one of the vastest volumes of verse in existence. … As one turns the pages of the big tome, it is still with a sense of surprise and incongruity. The curious mythological headpieces with their muscular nymphs and dank-haired river-gods, the mixed atmosphere of Dryden and “the Classicks,” the unfamiliar look of the lightest trifles in the largest type, the jumble of ode and epigram, of Martial and Spenser, of La Fontaine and the “weary King Ecclesiast”—all tend to heighten the wonderment with which one contemplates these portentous Poems on Several Occasions.²⁵¹

The 1718 edition of Prior's poems brought to a fitting end Tonson's most ambitious achievements. Short of publishing on vellum, he could carry elegance no farther. He could, and undoubtedly did, look back with satisfaction on his successive triumphs in a field which he had dominated. Tastes in the format of books inevitably change as the centuries pass, and the modern reader may examine Tonson's more ponderous volumes, if he consults them at all, with more curiosity than enjoyment. The important fact is that more assiduously than any other publisher of his time Tonson kept alive and introduced to an ever-widening reading public the finest works of distinguished authors.

Notes

1. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets Volume I, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905) “Dryden,” 372.

2. Ovid's Epistles (London, 1680), Preface. Mrs. Behn's “imitation” was Epistle 11, “Oenone to Paris.”

3. These editions appeared in 1681, 1683, 1693, 1701, 1705, and 1712.

4. See Hugh Macdonald, John Dryden, A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana (Oxford, 1939), p. 220.

5. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Joseph Knight (London, 1886), p. 37.

6. Macdonald, p. 20.

7. Johnson, I, “Dryden,” 373.

8. [John Dryden], Absalom and Achitophel, A Poem (London, 1681), “To the Reader.”

9. Johnson, I, “Dryden,” 436.

10. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborne. 2 vols. (Oxford, 1966), I, 28.

11. John Dryden, The Medall, A Satyre Against Sedition (London, 1682), “Epistle to the Whigs.”

12. Charles E. Ward, The Life of John Dryden (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1961), p. 187.

13. See Macdonald, p. 30.

14. Prose Works of Dryden, ed. Malone, II, 330-331n.

15. Plutarchs Lives. Translated From the Greek by Several Hands (London, 1683), “The Publisher to the Reader.”

16. The Letters of John Dryden, With Letters Addressed to Him, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham, N. C., 1942), p. 22.

17. Macdonald, p. 67.

18. Miscellany Poems (London, 1684), p. 90. After the first reference to each, the six volumes of Tonson's Miscellanies will be referred to briefly by the numbers of the volumes.

19. Dryden, Letters, p. 23.

20. Sylvae: or The Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies (London, 1685), Preface.

21. Ibid., p. 473.

22. John Dryden, Threnodia Augustalis (London, 1685), p. 22.

23. John Dryden, Albion and Albanius (London, 1685), Preface.

24. [John Dryden], The Hind and the Panther (London, 1687), “To the Reader.”

25. Johnson, I, “Dryden,” 380.

26. The Hind and the Panther Transvers'd To the Story of The Country-Mouse and the City-Mouse (London, 1687), Preface.

27. Spence, I, 278. But see Prose Works of Dryden, ed. Malone, I, 1, 199, and Johnson, II, “Halifax,” 43.

28. The Works of John Dryden, ed. Walter Scott (London, 1808), I, 331n.

29. John Dryden, Britannia Rediviva (London, 1688), p. 7.

30. John Dryden, The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis … Together with the Satires of Aulus Persius Flaccus (London, 1693), p. xiii.

31. Richard Tonson was buried in the church of St. Andrew, Holborn, on September 25, 1690. See GL MS. 6673/6.

32. Two other daughters, Mary, born in 1684, and Martha, born in 1686, did not survive childhood. The death of Martha in 1688 is noted in NPG Tonson MSS.

33. John Dryden, Amphitryon (London, 1690), “To the Honourable Sir William Levison Gower.”

34. John Dryden, King Arthur: or, The British Worthy (London, 1691), “To the Marquis of Halifax.”

35. See Ward, Dryden, pp. 250-251.

36. Johnson, I, “Dryden,” 407.

37. Dryden, Letters, p. 49.

38. Ibid., pp. 51-52.

39. Add. MSS. 36,933. See also William Congreve, William Congreve, Letters and Documents, ed. John C. Hodges (New York, 1964), pp. 96-97.

40. See Dryden, Letters, p. 172, and William Congreve, ed. Hodges, pp. 99-100.

41. Ward, Dryden, p. 273.

42. Dryden, Letters, p. 77. For details of payments and receipts see Henry B. Wheatley, Dryden's Publishers (London, 1912), pp. 22-24, Charles E. Ward, “The Publication and Profits of Dryden's Virgil,” PMLA, LIII (1938), 807-812, and John Barnard, “Dryden, Tonson, and Subscriptions for the 1697 Virgil,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, LVII (1963), 129-151.

43. Dryden, Letters, p. 78.

44. Ibid., pp. 80-81.

45. Ibid., p. 85.

46. Johnson, I, “Dryden,” 407.

47. Prose Works of Dryden, ed. Malone, I, 1, 525-528. See Richard Powys to Matthew Prior, HMC Bath MSS. (Hereford, 1908), III, 238-239, for a different, less probable, version of this episode.

48. Dryden, Letters, p. 59.

49. Dryden, Works, ed. Scott, I, 391.

50. John Dryden, Jr., The Husband His Own Cuckold (London, 1696), Preface.

51. John Dryden, The Works of Virgil (London, 1697), “Aeneis,” Dedication.

52. Ibid., “The Pastorals,” Dedication.

53. Ibid., “Aeneis,” Dedication.

54. Dryden, Letters, p. 93.

55. Ibid., p. 96.

56. Ibid., p. 98.

57. Dryden paraphrased three of The Canterbury Tales (“The Knight's Tale,” “The Nun's Priest's Tale,” and “The Wife of Bath's Tale”), imitated and enlarged the description of “A good Parson” in the “Prologue,” and included a paraphrase of “The Flower and the Leaf,” then attributed to Chaucer. He paraphrased one whole book of Ovid's Metamorphoses and included excerpts from three others.

58. John Dryden, Fables Ancient and Modern; Translated into Verse, from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, & Chaucer (London, 1700), Preface.

59. Ibid.

60. Ward, Dryden, p. 304.

61. See Prose Works of Dryden, ed. Malone, I, 1, 561, and Dryden, Works, ed. Scott, XVIII, 191.

62. This is known as the Bayfordbury portrait of Dryden and is now in Trinity College, Cambridge.

63. See Dryden, Letters, pp. 98-99, for Dryden's comment to Tonson: “I know my translation [of Ovid's de Arte Amandi] is very uncorrect: but at the same time I know no body else can do it better, with all their pains.”

64. The Works of Mr. Francis Beaumont, and Mr. John Fletcher (London, 1711), I, Preface, xii-xxvi. Johnson later reprinted a portion of these notes in Lives, I, “Dryden,” 471-479.

65. Spence, I, 277.

66. See Dryden's verses to Congreve prefixed to William Congreve's The Double-Dealer (London, 1694).

67. The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq. (London, 1717), I, “To His Grace the Duke of Newcastle.”

68. Johnson, I, “Dryden,” 395.

69. On a blank page of the manuscript of the “Pastorals,” Pope listed the names of those who had seen the poem. Among the Kit-Cats, besides Walsh and Congreve, were Mainwaring, Garth, Halifax, and Wharton.

70. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford, 1956), I, 17.

71. Ibid., p. 50n.

72. Ibid., p. 50.

73. Pope to Henry Cromwell, Nov. 1, 1708, ibid., pp. 51-52.

74. Ibid., p. 59.

75. Ibid., pp. 60-61.

76. Ibid., p. 62.

77. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborne, 2 vols. Oxford, 1966. I, 208.

78. Examen Poeticum: Being the Third Part of Miscellany Poems (London, 1693), Dedication.

79. Dryden, Juvenal and Persius, “To Mr. Dryden, on His Translation of Persius.”

80. Edmund Gosse, Life of William Congreve (London, 1888), p. 56.

81. The Annual Miscellany For the Year 1694 (London, 1694), p. 180.

82. Diary of Mary Countess Cowper, 1714-1720 (London, 1864), pp. 23-24. As Mary Clavering, Lady Cowper had been one of Congreve's Kit-Cat toasts in 1703.

83. Robert Allen, The Clubs of Augustan London. (Cambridge, 1933), p. 234. Luctus Britannici was edited by Henry Playford and Abel Roper.

84. First printed in Charles Gildon's A New Miscellany of Original Poems (London, 1701).

85. Richard Steele, Poetical Miscellanies (London, 1714), Dedication.

86. William Congreve, A Pindarique Ode … to the King (London, 1695), p. 4.

87. William Congreve, A Pindarique Ode … to the Queen (London, 1706), p. 5.

88. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets Volume II, Oxford, 1905. “Congreve,” 232.

89. Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, F. R. S., ed. William Bray (London, 1891), III, 369.

90. William Congreve, ed. Hodges, p. 21.

91. Ibid., pp. 16-17 and 104-105.

92. Ibid., p. 98

93. Ibid., p. 108.

94. Pope, Correspondence, II, 133.

95. William Congreve, ed. Hodges, p. 136.

96. Dryden, Dramatick Works, ed. Congreve, I, Dedication.

97. See The Poetical Works of John Gay, ed. G. C. Faber (London, 1926), p. 166.

98. William Congreve, The Tears of Amaryllis for Amyntas (London, 1703), “To the Reader.”

99. William Congreve, Five Plays (London [1710]), printed by H. Hills.

100. The Works of Mr. William Congreve (London, 1710), I, Preface.

101. Matthew Prior, The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, in 2 vols., II, Oxford, 1959, 831-832.

102. The Gentleman's Journal, Feb., 1692, p. 5.

103. Miscellany Poems Upon Several Occasions, ed. Charles Gildon (London, 1692), p. 7.

104. Prior, Literary Works, II, 827.

105. Ibid., I, 85.

106. Ibid., II, 853.

107. HMC Downshire MSS. I, Part I, 465.

108. Matthew Prior, To the King, An Ode on His Majesty's Arrival in Holland (London, 1695), p. 11.

109. The Gentleman's Magazine, N.Ser. II (1834), 464.

110. HMC Downshire MSS. I, Part II, 551.

111. Prior, Literary Works, II, 896.

112. The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise, Prose Works, IV (London and New York, 1926), 140.

113. Add. MSS. 40,060, ff. 59-60.

114. See Ralph Straus, The Unspeakable Curll (London, 1927).

115. The Daily Courant, No. 1491 (1707).

116. Ibid., No. 1497 (1707).

117. Ibid., No. 1502 (1707).

118. Ibid., No. 1597 (1707).

119. [Matthew Prior], Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1707), “Advertisement, From the Publisher.”

120. Prior to Halifax, Feb. 4, 1707, Add. MSS. 7121, ff. 49-50.

121. [Matthew Prior], Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1709), Preface.

122. For example, in “The Ladle” “Fate's Commands” becomes “Tate's Commands,” in the badly mangled “An English Padlock” “Staple” becomes “Steeple,” and in “A Simile” “Pindar” becomes “Pindus.”

123. Prior, Literary Works, II, 887.

124. The London Gazette, No. 5418 (1716).

125. Curll published with Gosling and Pemberton The Carpenter of Oxford, or, The Miller's Tale, From Chaucer … To which are added, Two Imitations of Chaucer, I. Susannah and the Two Elders. II. Earl Robert's Mice. By Matthew Prior, Esq. (London, 1712).

126. The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq., ed. Thomas Tickell (London, 1721), I, Preface.

127. Third Miscellany, p. 248.

128. Fourth Miscellany, pp. 318-322.

129. The Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Walter Graham (Oxford, 1941), p. 3.

130. Joseph Addison, A Poem to His Majesty. Presented to the Lord Keeper (London, 1695), p. 3.

131. Dryden, Virgil, “Postscript to the Reader,” p. 624.

132. FSL Tonson MSS. C.c.1 (42).

133. Addison, Works, I, Preface.

134. Joseph Addison, The Campaign (London, 1705), p. 14.

135. Joseph Addison, Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (London, 1705), Dedication and Preface.

136. Addison, Works, I, Preface.

137. Peter Smithers, Joseph Addison (Oxford, 1954), p. 103.

138. Donald F. Bond, “The First Printing of the Spectator,” in MP, XLVII (1950), 165.

139. The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff Esq. (London, 1711), IV, Preface.

140. For a valuable review of the probable procedure followed in printing The Spectator, see The Spectator, ed. Bond, I, xxvii-xxix.

141. Sir Richard Steele, Correspondence London, 1941, p. 461n.

142. HL MS. H. M. 20052.

143. The Spectator, I, No. 1 (1711), 5.

144. Ibid., I, No. 10 (1711), 44.

145. Ibid., p. xxvi.

146. For the vogue of The Spectator see Alexandre Beljame, Men of Letters and The English Public in the Eighteenth Century 1660-1744, trans. E. O. Lorimer, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London, 1948), pp. 311-314.

147. The Guardian (London, 1714), I, “The Publisher to the Reader.”

148. Ibid., No. 59 (1713).

149. HMC Seventh Report (London, 1879), Part I, Appendix, 239.

150. [Giles Jacob?], Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq. (London, 1719), p. 40.

151. Alexander Pope, Correspondence, in 5 vols., I. (New York, 1957), 175.

152. Peter Smithers, Joseph Addison (Oxford, 1954), p. 260.

153. Ibid., p. 253.

154. See Spence, I, 79, for Tonson's comment on this subject.

155. Elizabeth “Ousley” may have had as a nurse in infancy a certain Dorothea Ousley, who managed secret confinements as an agent for Richard Savage, fourth Earl Rivers, and perhaps for others. See Johnson, II, “Savage,” p. 325n and p. 439.

156. See Add. MSS. 28,276, ff. 1-2 for receipts signed by Elizabeth Tonson for quarterly payments of £6 from her brother in 1706, 1707, and 1708.

157. Elizabeth Tonson was buried on March 6 in the church of St. Mary Le Strand, which had become the parish church of the Tonsons. The registers of this church are kept in the Archives Department, Westminster Public Library.

158. Elizabeth “Ousley” was married in St. Paul's Cathedral on May 14, 1720. See Publications of the Harleian Society, XXVI (1899), 55.

159. The Epistolary Correspondence of Sir Richard Steele, ed. John Nichols (London, 1787), pp. 261-264. Mrs. Aynston's eldest grandson received Steele's family papers from Steele's legitimate daughter Elizabeth, Lady Trevor.

160. Mr. Steele's Apology for Himself and His Writings (London, 1714), p. 80.

161. Ibid.

162. Ibid., p. 48.

163. Richard Steele, The Tender Husband (London, 1705), Dedication.

164. [John Gay], The Present State of Wit (London, 1711), p. 12.

165. Ibid., p. 21.

166. Addison, Letters, p. 280.

167. Steele, Apology, p. xiv.

168. Colley Cibber, Ximena (London, 1719), “To Sir Richard Steele,” pp. xi-xii.

169. Thomas Somerville, The History of Great Britain during the Reign of Queen Anne (London, 1798), Appendix, No. XXXVI.

170. Steele, Correspondence, p. 251.

171. Steele's Apology had been advertised in The Daily Courant (No. 3975) on July 21, 1714, as to be printed “within a few days.”

172. Steele, Apology, p. 88.

173. See Steele, Correspondence, p. 236n.

174. Pope, Correspondence, I, 193.

175. Steele, Correspondence, p. 47.

176. Add. MSS. 28,275, f. 57.

177. Joseph Addison, The Drummer (London, 1722), “To Mr. Congreve.”

178. Alexander Pope, Correspondence, in 5 vols., I. (Oxford, 1956), pp. 373-374.

179. See The Gentleman's Journal, May, 1692, p. 25.

180. Dryden, Juvenal and Persius, pp. li-lii.

181. Ibid., p. lii.

182. Ibid., p. xxxix.

183. Ibid., p. 191.

184. Ibid., p. 204.

185. Ibid. (Persius), p. 70.

186. Ibid., p. xxxi.

187. Ibid., p. xxxiii.

188. Ibid., p. xxxvii.

189. Ibid., pp. xxxvii-xxxviii.

190. Virgil, “Aeneis,” Dedication.

191. Ibid., “Postscript to the Reader,” p. 621.

192. FSL Tonson MSS. C.c.1 (22).

193. John Dryden, The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward, (Durham, NC, 1942), p. 94.

194. Mark Van Doren, John Dryden (a reissue, Bloomington, 1960), p. 255.

195. Elizabeth Nitchie, Vergil and The English Poets (New York, 1919), p. 152.

196. See Henry V. S. Ogden and Margaret S. Ogden, English Taste in Landscape in the Seventeenth Century (Ann Arbor, 1955).

197. Joseph Addison, Letters (Oxford, 1941), p. 43.

198. John Watts (c. 1700-1763) had an important printing house in Little Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields.

199. William Thomas Lowndes, The Bibliographer's Manual of English Literature (London, 1885), I, 344.

200. See Lucretii Cari De Rerum Natura (London, 1713) for statement of this license.

201. For Johnson's comment see Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934), IV, 2.

202. Bodl. MS. Montagu d. 18, f. 4.

203. The London Gazette, No. 5217 (1714).

204. Richard Beale Davis, George Sandys, Poet-Adventurer (London [1955]), p. 204.

205. Ibid., p. 224.

206. For Dryden's previously printed translations from the Metamorphoses see the Third Miscellany, the Fifth Miscellany, and Fables; for Addison's, Tate's, and Stonestreet's see the Fifth Miscellany.

207. [Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope], Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (London, 1727), IV, 122-127.

208. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men in 2 vols, Vol. I. (Oxford, 1966), p. 333.

209. This manuscript, long in the possession of the Tonsons of Bayfordbury, is now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

210. Thomas Rymer, Tragedies of the Last Age Considered (London, 1678), p. 143.

211. Newton, “Life of Milton,” p. xlviii.

212. See Samuel Leigh Sotheby, Ramblings in the Elucidation of the Autograph of Milton (London, 1861), pp. 196-204.

213. David Masson, The Life of John Milton (London, 1880), VI, 786.

214. John Milton, Paradise Lost (London, 1711), Dedication.

215. The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, ed. Nicholas Rowe (London, 1709), I, Dedication.

216. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, in 2 volumes, II, (Oxford, 1905), “Rowe,” 71.

217. The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson (London, 1765), I, Preface.

218. David Nichol Smith, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1928), p. 33.

219. See Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (London, 1693), pp. 86f.

220. Works of Shakespear, ed. Rowe, I, “Some Account,” iii.

221. Ibid., p. xxxi.

222. Ibid., p. xviii.

223. Ibid., p. xix.

224. Ibid., p. xxiv.

225. Ibid., p. xxxiii.

226. Johnson, II, “Rowe,” 71.

227. Smith, p. 31.

228. Shakespeare, Plays, ed. Johnson, I, Preface. See the account of Rowe in Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives (Oxford, 1970), pp. 129-135.

229. The six plays were: The London Prodigal, The Life and Death of Thomas Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan, The Tragedy of Locrine, and A Yorkshire Tragedy. Pope rejected these plays as spurious, but also questioned Shakespeare's authorship of Pericles and parts of certain other plays.

230. The Daily Courant, No. 2392 (1709).

231. The Tatler, No. 57 (1709).

232. “Remarks on the Plays of Shakespear,” in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, “Volume the Seventh” (London, 1710), p. 43.

233. “An Essay on the … Stage,” ibid., p. 2.

234. FSL MS. S.a.163. This manuscript is a quarto sheet, written about 1740, headed, “Paid the Editors of Shakespear.”

235. The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser (London, 1715), I, Dedication.

236. Ibid., p. xxvi.

237. Ibid., p. liii.

238. Ibid., pp. ci-cii.

239. Ibid., pp. lviii-lix.

240. Ibid., p. lxi.

241. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. F. Elrington Ball (London, 1910-1914), II, 360.

242. Pope, Correspondence, I, 521.

243. HMC Bath MSS., III, 450.

244. Harleian MSS. 3780, f. 342 and 344.

245. Swift, Correspondence, III, 8.

246. Ibid., p. 4.

247. Matthew Prior, Poems on Several Occasions. A New Edition With some Additions which are not in the folio Edition (London, 1720), pp. 449-451. Many pieces, all of which are in the 1718 edition, were marked with an asterisk in the table of contents as “not printed in the former Editions.”

248. The Conversation was printed by Jacob junior in 1720. Down-Hall was one of Curll's happier (unauthorized) grabs, published in 1723, after Prior's death. According to the title page, this whimsical ballad was “Printed for J. Roberts” (one of Curll's “sleeping” partners).

249. Poems on Several Occasions (1718 edition), p. 319.

250. Ibid., Preface to “Solomon,” p. 390.

251. Selected Poems of Matthew Prior, ed. Austin Dobson (London, 1889), Preface, pp. xi-xiii.