ACCOUNT OF THE RAREST BOOKS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED WHICH DURING THE LAST FIFTY YEARS HAVE COME UNDER J. PAYNE COLLIER F. S. A. IN FOUR VOLUMES VOL. I NEW YORK DAVID G. FRANCIS 506 BROADWAY CHARLES SCRIBNER & CO. 124 GRAND ST. 1866 PREFACE. PR431 DURING my whole life, now rapidly approaching fourscore, I have been a diligent reader, and, as far as my means would allow, a greedy purchaser of all works connected with early English literature. It is nearly sixty years since I became possessor of my first really valuable old book of this kind, Wilson's "Art of Logic," printed by Richard Grafton in 1551, - from which I ascertained the not unimportant facts that "Ralph Roister Doister" was an older play than "Gammer Gurton's Needle," and that it had been written by Nicholas Udall, Master of Eton School. I thus learned who was the author of the earliest comedy, properly so called, in our language. This was my first literary discovery, made several years anterior, although I had not occasion to render it public, until I printed my Notes upon "Dodsley's Old Plays " soon after 1820. My latest discovery, which occurred only a few months ago, is that "Tottel's Miscellany," 1557, the oldest and most interesting in our language, containing as it does the poems of the Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyat, and their contemporaries, has always, during the last three centuries, been reprinted, by Dr. Sewell, Bishop Percy, Dr. Nott, and their followers, from the second instead of the first edition. The differences between the two are not merely extremely curious, but very interesting and important. Between the one discovery and the other there was an interval of perhaps fifty years; and whatever may appear to be new in the ensuing volumes has been the result of literary investigation during considerably more than that period. My early employments were irksome and wearisome; but, stimulated in some degree by my first success, and by my love for the best poetry the world has produced, I lightened my labors by the collection and perusal of old English books, and by making extracts from and criticisms upon them, whether in prose or verse; so that in time they formed a large body of manuscripts, consisting of separate articles alphabetically arranged. The work in the hands of the reader has been mainly derived from this source, and not a few of the notices are of forty, or even fifty, years standing. Although I kept constantly adding to, altering and correcting them, both as to facts and opinions, some of them are, in the most material points, just as they came from my pen, soon after the perusal of the books to which they relate. It will be found that a few are reviews of productions altogether unknown to bibliographers, while others apply to publications of which only a single copy remains to us, or to separate tracts of the utmost rarity. It is true that notices of a very few more common, but still scarce, books will be found interspersed, a circumstance arising from the fact that I have incorpo |