Poetical Miscellany--M[ennes], Sir J[ohn] and Ja[mes] S[mith].

8vo, first edition, red morocco gilt by Rivière, spine gilt in compartments, gilt dentelles, gilt edges, some minor spotting and browning, without A1 (blank), occasional minor damp-staining, repairs to first and last two leaves, off-setting to endpapers

John R.B. Brett-Smith, the sale of his library at Sotheby's, 27 May 2004, lot 418

Wing M1710; Grolier Wither to Prior 547; Timothy Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy (1994

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing, when appropriate.
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This celebrated miscellany contains a number of poems by two notable royalists. One, Sir John Mennes (1599-1671), served as an admiral before and during the Civil War, as well as (somewhat incompetently) after the Restoration, besides being for some time governor of North Wales. The other, Mennes's friend James Smith (1605-67), was a chaplain who served on certain naval expeditions before the Civil War, leading a quieter (if somewhat debauched) life of steady advancement in the church thereafter. Both men wrote jovial, racy, ribald, "sportive" verses which for some years were widely circulated in manuscript among the coteries of city gentlemen, wits, would-be courtiers and actors of the period. Their verse was subversive, supporting royalist propaganda, and very influential on the development of Restoration genres such as the burlesque.

The canon of both Mennes and Smith, partly based on Musarum Deliciae, has now been established by Raylor (pp.217-40). He notes that not only has it been a source of confusion to attribute indiscriminately all the contents of this volume to Mennes and Smith -- the publication is essentially a poetical miscellany (though not recorded in Case) -- but that there is also "no evidence" for the assumption that they edited it ("and much against it"). The implication in "The Stationer to the Ingenious Reader" is that the publisher, Herringman himself, edited it. Raylor argues that of the 45 poems eight can be attributed to Mennes and Smith, and nineteen to others, while the remaining seventeen anonymous poems include a few which might be attributable to them on stylistic grounds.