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Dryden Attributions and Texts from Harley Ms. 6054

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Dryden Attributions and Texts from Harley Ms. 6054 DRYDEN ATTRIBUTIONS AND TEXTS FROM HARLEY MS. 6054 HILT ON KELLIHER IN a footnote to the long and scholarly biography with which in 1800 Edmond Malone prefaced his edition of Dryden's prose he drew attention to a couplet preserved in a manuscript verse-miscellany in the British Museum Library.1 The text in its precise form differs slightly from the transcript that he gave, and runs2 Epitaph intended by Mr Dryden For His Wife. Here Lyes My Wife, here let Her Lye Now She's at Rest, and so am I. Malone continued : 'Though there is no evidence that these lines were written by [Dryden], they yet shew that the received opinion of the last age was, that little harmony subsisted between them. Whoever was the writer, the thought is not original, being evidently suggested by a well-known old French epitaph: C'y gist ma femme: 0, qu'elle est bien Pour son repos, ... et pour le mien! Malone's source for the text of the English epigram was an anthology of poems compiled apparently for Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford, whose autograph annotations appear throughout at various points. His interest in verse is well attested both in the Harley collection and the Portland Papers. 3 The miscellany includes work by Pope, Prior and Swift, all members of his circle ofliterary friends, and seems to have been assembled during the 1720s : the latest datable item, which occurs among a short section of epitaphs (ff. 88v- 97v) where the above couplet figures, is the mock epitaph written for Gay by Pope in 1728. 4 As it happens, unremarked by Malone, the French epitaph reappears a few pages later (f. 94 v), preceded by a different English version reading : Here lies my Wife how well does She incline For Her repose, but O' much more for mine. The French couplet which Malone identified as the original of these English verses is generally attributed to the Norman poet Jacques du Lorens (d. 1655), author of some verse Satyres (1646). He is said to have composed it on the death of his own wife, though l ----- Fig I. John Dryden by Sir Godfrey Kneller, engraved by J. Houbraken; Thomas Birch, Heads of Illustrious Persons ... (London, 1756), facing p. 173, C.6.e.8 Fig. 2 . Dryden's proxy for the receipt of his salary as Poet Laureate by his wife, 1687. Add. MS. 70949, f. 25 this cannot literally be true, for by the time that she died, in 1652, it had been current in England for some time. 5 The minor poet and dramatist Robert Baron translated it, without acknowledgment, as Epigram xxrv in his Pocu!a Castalia of 1650: 2 Epitaph, On a Scolding Woman, Sub persona mariti. Here lies my Wife interr'd; oh how Good is't for her quiet, and mine too. Thereafter the conceit entered general circulation; another version survives on a grave in the Old Greyfriars burying ground in Edinburgh. 6 Not surprisingly, Malone's revelations led later editors of Dryden to suppress the English couplet from the canon: its very existence is nowadays virtually untraceable outside a few popular verse­ anthologies of the present century. 7 A further text has now come to light in another private verse-miscellany of the late seventeenth century in the Harley collection. Density of matter, untidy presentation and minuteness of hands have evidently discouraged serious investigation of British Library, Harley MS. 6054, on f. 20 of which occurs this jotting (fig. 3): A french Icy gist ma ffeme o que le bien Pur sop repose et pur la mien Englishd by Dreyd-n from his own mouth Here lies my wife ther lett her lie ffor she's att rest & so am I Compared with the laboured attempts quoted above the English couplet certainly reads like an extempore version (although the abrupt shift of adverb from 'Here' to 'ther' in the first line, which partly contributes to this impression, was not necessarily an error based on mishearing). The blunders committed in the French original might also be explained by its having been taken down directly from speech, though this is not necessarily to imply that the lines were jotted down at first hand into the present notebook. But above all, the gloss offers an alternative explanation of the genesis of the piece. It challenges editorial rejection of the Dryden attribution by discounting, or at least modifying, the autobiographical interpretation on which it has hitherto been judged. Before we may properly assess the reliability of this and other Dryden attributions and texts surviving in the new source some fairly tedious groundwork is unavoidable. Although in essence a collection of verse, Harley MS. 6054 has none of the usual formalities of presentation shown in contemporary manuscript miscellanies. It is purely and simply a private memorandum book, to which the owner turned at odd times to jot down whatever had taken his fancy. As it now stands it is imperfect at several points. Moreover, the distribution of the contents and the presence of two separate series of apparently contemporary paginations suggest that it incorporates the remains of not one but two notebooks. These were duly distinguished in the printed catalogue of 1808, 3 Fig. 3. Page from the Killingworth notebook, showing the satirical distich on Dryden's change of religion and his translation of the du Lorens epitaph. BL, Harley MS. 6054, f. 20 4 though without any hint of the connection that is established between the two by a shared watermark and main hand.8 1. A fragment of a larger book beginning at p. 44, with collections on Roman Antiquities dated 1676. A rule to multiply any number above 5 on the fingers . p. 69, & a few miscellanies, top. 82. · Then follow many blank leaves. 2. A Miscellaneous collection of another kind, beginning at p. 27, and containing Poems Latin & English. As a burlesque parody on' Qui mihi.' p. 38, with a considerable number of Epigrams, Epitaphs, the Song of a Soldier & a Sailor in Latin, &c. it extends to p. 116. Written in several different hands. The first notebook (now ff. 1-IIv, plus blanks), which now lacks twenty-four leaves from the numbered sequence and perhaps an unspecified quantity at the end, relates mostly to Roman history and law, and includes extracts (ff. 2-5), dated 1676, from Thomas Godwin's frequently-reissued study of Roman Antiquities, along with others (ff. 8v-<)v) from Edward Stillingfleet's Bonds of Resignation, published in 1695. This at once suggests that, though perhaps beginning life as a schoolbook, it remained in use until a much later period. The second notebook, from which at least fifteen leaves are now wanting, includes a few theological notes but is mostly given up to miscellaneous occasional verse, jotted down at various times and in several hands. While the initial section (ff. 12-13v, with intervening leaf now missing), copied in an idiosyncratic script, includes some Latin distichs of 1671 (f. 12v), the principal contents largely date from the reigns of James II and William III. The verse, which derives in part from printed sources, consists mostly of Latin, French, and occasionally Anglo- and Franco-Latin epigrams on topical subjects, many of them accompanied by versions in English. There are also some renderings of popular verse into Latin, an exercise that the seventeenth century particularly delighted in. O.verall, verse-translation forms the principal ingredient in the whole collection. The presence here of several items by Dryden, no less than some possibility of personal contact with the poet that may be implied by the heading of the du Lorens translation, makes identification of their copyist a matter of some concern. All these items fall within one section (ff. 20-27) of the manuscript, and may have been the work of a single scribe. They were jotted down over a period of time by a scribe labouring most of the time, as the frequent use of abbreviated forms of words shows, under some constriction from the double-column format. He was responsible for most of the material entered here, and the basic characteristics of his hand reappear in a more relaxed and rounded script that is seen at intervals throughout. All the same, the collection bears clear marks of multiple participation, presenting a considerable problem from the sheer variety of hands - some nine in all - that contributed to it. Distinguishing these with any certainty is difficult, but their distribution appears to be as follows. All or almost all of the first notebook was transcribed by a single copyist (A) whose hand is seen in probably its earliest form, dating from circa but after 1676, on ff. 2-5 passim. This script, in various 5 ~a) V)_ s r" ~ Nutt th .i t tlu. p/.ui:.r, /ilu C,•11 r t;, ,:11,/ 11vl '~ 0 F'-;lll1 'C./ ,1 .,. ;u~n:ht11tl".1 hL"T ty;J } ,..1 1 ·c'1·11.s, vr .Fl,u.·,:. ,.-,r,,.,,~~:.f11.ill ' ~ .., /f.:.:.Jltflt - . :r Jf .E ~c,- ~,:)lJ I jtJV b:; t!_D_±_~~:ff~f ... d J '"-";/1! t/.· 6,.,o .F~~t- Fig. 4. Farringdon Ward Without, with corrections, 1720; surveyed by William Leyboume, Richard Blome and John Strype, circa 1676-1708. BL, Map Library, Crace Portfolio VIII - 24 (detail) 6 ------------------- forms, is everywhere apparent on ff. 13v- 29v, 35v-38 passim, 41v and 43v. In addition, there is some reason to think that the formal script found on ff. 1, 14v and 15 is also his. Two other hands (B and C) copied sections, respectively, on ff.
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