Manuscript verse miscellany.

A collection of poems dating from the age of Elizabeth to the Restoration and having a particularly significant group by the Cavalier Poets, including an important group of seventeen poems by Thomas Carew, poems by Donne (5), Jonson (3), James Shirley, John Cleveland (2), William Strode, Francis Beaumont, Edmund Waller, Sir Philip Sidney, Aurelian Townshend, George Etherege, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Lodge, Edward Dyer, the Second Earl of Essex, and others, often providing the name of the author, including what is thought to be the earliest recorded version of the ballad "Auld Lang Syne," the volume with title-page and divided into eight books, written in about six different mid-seventeenth-century hands, some poems crossed through, contemporary pagination, 260 pages, 8vo (160 x 105 mm), title page dated 1667; occasional slight worming and staining. Contemporary calf panelled in blind, spine in compartments; hinges weak.

James Crichton, Second Viscount Frendraught, d.1674/5 (ownership inscription, "Frendraught Legi," on title page) — Thomas Fraser Duff, 1830-77, of Woodcote, Oxfordshire (armorial bookplate) — Bloomsbury Book Auctions, 1987, lot 272. acquisition: Purchased at the foregoing sale through Bernard Quaritch

CELM; Auld Lang Syne: The Story of a Song, The Morgan Library & Museum, online exhibition (http://www.themorgan.org/collection/Auld-Lang-Syne)

"Should old acquaintant be forgot
and never thought upon
The flams of lov extinguished
and freely past and gon
Is thy kind heart become so cold
that loving breast of thin
That thou can never think upon
Kind old lang syne..."

A rich and varied verse miscellany. This collection by a Scottish aristocrat includes one of the most substantial surviving collections of verse by Thomas Carew (see lot ***) as well as historical ballads such as "Chevy Chase" and "Fair Rosamund" lyrics, epigrams, and satires. Some of the content betrays its author's Scottish origins, such as epitaphs on the Marquess of Montrose, the comic "Speach of a fife Laird," and "Old Lang Syne." This last — which variously gives the spelling "lang" and "long" — is perhaps the earliest of several different versions of the ballad that circulated in the seventeenth-century (the first printed version appeared in 1711). This text is an early point in a tradition that would inspire Robert Burns, whose version has in time become the best-known song in Scots.

Little is known of James Crichton, Second Viscount Frendraught, who compiled this volume. The family estates were in Aberdeenshire and Frendraught's father, the First Viscount, had been a royalist who had led a somewhat turbulent life and died in 1664 or 1665, shortly before this manuscript was compiled.