PREFACE. HAVE frequently felt surprise and regret that no modern and complete edition of the poetical works of Father Southwell should have been submitted to the public, especially when of late its taste has been directed so much, and so favourably, to the writers of the sixteenth century. And these sentiments have been induced not by a mere natural bias or respect towards the illustrious Society of which he was a member (and which I hold in the highest veneration, honour, and esteem), but because my appreciation of the intrinsic worth of the poems themselves is shared by the few living individuals who are conversant with them (for the editions are all of exceeding rarity), and has been anticipated by such acknowledged critics in that department of our early literature as Headly, Warton, Park, and others. It was therefore with no common alacrity that I responded to the wish of the respected publisher, that I should superintend for his Library of Old English Authors the present volume, the text of which I have settled and based upon the London edition of 1634, with the valuable aid of a manuscript purchased at the sale of the library of Mr. Heber in April, 1836, and now among the additional manuscripts in the British Museum, No. 10,422. It is inexplicable why the late Mr. Walter, who, in 1817, reprinted St. Peter's Complaint, and who congratulated himself on having had access to this very manuscript, as well as on having procured" the whole of our author's printed works, one single tract excepted," should have omitted no fewer than THIRTYSEVEN poems contained in this manuscript, and diffused through the several early editions, availing himself only of three in the manuscript not previously published.* The interesting manuscript† referred to, if not in the autograph of Southwell, is certainly either contemporary with him or very little later. A list of all his works and their respective editions will be found at the end of the biographical sketch which follows these preliminary remarks. The only liberty which I have taken, beyond settling the * I refrain from criticism on Mr. Walter's text. †This manuscript tallies in contents and arrangement with the one formerly in the library of the Catholic Church at Bury St. Edmunds, noticed in Canon Oliver's Collections, but which unfortunately has gone amissing since he compiled his biographies. |