ANATOMY OF THE WORLD.-An Anatomy of the World. Wherein by occasion of the untimely death of Mistris Elizabeth Drury, the frailty and the decay of this whole world is represented.-London, Printed for Samuel Macham, and are to be solde at his shop in Paules Churchyard, at the signe of the Bul-head. An. Dom. 1611. 8vo. 16 leaves.

This is an earlier edition than any hitherto discovered, that of 1612 being the first mentioned by bibliographers; and it was published anonymously in four distinct impressions, viz., of 1611, 1612, 1621, and 1625, before it was included in the 4to volume of the "Poems" of Dr. Donne, published in 1633, after his death. The subject of the tribute before us was the daughter of Sir Robert Drury, with whom Donne for some time resided, and whom he accompanied to Paris. In a letter dated from Paris, 14th April, 1612, Donne mentions that the “Anatomy of the World" had been printed. The copy at Bridgewater House consists of only 15 leaves; but sign. A is a fly-leaf, existing in another copy of 1611 very recently recovered, and making the whole tract 16 leaves, or two 8vo sheets.

Donne was at one period, before his marriage with the daughter of Sir George Moore, Secretary to Lord Chancellor Ellesmere; and some documents subscribed by Donne are preserved among the MSS. at Bridgewater House.

The variations between the first edition of these poems in 1611 (printed, perhaps, only for private distribution) and that in 1633 are not many, and they are rarely of importance; but there is an exception in the very last line of what is placed under the heading "The Anatomy of the World." In the edition of 1611 it runs thus:

:

"The grave keeps bodies, verse the same enroules;"

and the misprint, by mistaking the long s and f, might not be detected, if we did not refer to the 4to of 1633, where it stands as follows:

"The Grave keepes bodies, Verse the Fame enroules."

Dr. Donne was a poet before he had attained his twentieth year; for although his Satires are not known to have been printed until 1633, some of them were written forty years earlier, and a MS. copy dated 1593 is preserved in the British Museum-[MS. Harl. 5110.] From

what he says in one of his letters dated in 1614, and from other circumstances, it may be doubted whether a now lost edition of his Satires was not then privately circulated. Francis Davison, editor of "The Poetical Rhapsody" (1602, 1608, 1811, and 1621), who died before 1620, records in an undated memorandum, that he had lent a copy of "J. Dun's Satyres" to his brother Christopher. This copy might, however, have been a manuscript. They were sons to poor scape-goat William Davison, who was sacrificed for accomplishing the wish of Q. Elizabeth, as regarded the death of Mary of Scotland.

ANSWER.-An Aunswere to the Proclamation of the Rebels in the North. 1569.-Imprinted at London by Willyam Seres. Cum Privilegio. 8vo. B. L. 10 leaves.

We apprehend that we have to add a new name to the list of our early writers of verse, in the person of William Seres, the printer, who here put forth a production of his own on the subject of the Rebellion in the North in 1569: it is of extreme rarity, and has hitherto been given to Thomas Norton, merely on the ground that he was unquestionably the author of an address, in prose, "To the Queene's Majesties poore deceiued Subjectes of the North Countrey." That, however, was printed by Bynneman, and not by Seres, who, at the end of the piece before us, thus placed his own initials

"FINIS qd (W. S.)

God saue the Queene."

William Seres, as the printer, would hardly have made his own initials thus conspicuous, if they had not been intended to prove that he was the author. He entered the "Answer" in his own name at Stationers' Hall, and it does no discredit to his skill as a versifyer, or to his loyalty as a subject. It is not mentioned by Ames, Herbert, or Dibdin among works from the press of Seres, but in their time a copy of it was known: to present it as the work of so distinguished an early typographer gives it additional interest.

It opens, as follows, in lines of fourteen syllables divided, and with rhyme at the end of the eight-syllable line, as well as at the end of the six-syllable line.

"O Lorde! stretch out thy mightie hande

against this raging route,

And saue our Prince, our state and land,
which they doe go about

For to subuert and ouerthrowe,
and make this Realme a pray
For other Nations here to growe,
what so, like fooles, they say."

Seres does not keep up this inconvenient multiplication of rhymes, as may be seen in the subsequent portion of the "Answer" to the sixth Article of the Proclamation of the Rebels:

"You say hir Grace is led by such

as wicked are and euill:

By whom, I pray you, are ye led?
I may say, by the Deuill.

Whom would ye poynt to leade hir Grace,

if ye might haue your choyse?

The Pope, I thinke, your father chiefe,

should haue your holy voyse;

And then she should be led, indeede,
as Lambe for to be slaine.

Wo worth such heades, as so would fee
hir Grace for all hir paine!"

Some twenty, or more, passages might be quoted from authors before Shakespeare, in illustration of his concluding lines in "King John," "Nought shall make us rue,

If England to itself do rest but true;"

and Seres shews us that the sentiment, if not the expression, was, in fact, proverbial:

"A Proverbe olde, no lande there is

that can this lande subdue,

If we agree within our selues,

and to our Realme be true."

The whole is written with facility, and the poem concludes quite as well as it began, continuing the address to the Rebels :

"Bethinke your selues, and take aduice,

and speedily repent:

Accept the pardon of the Prince,

when it to you is sent.

So may you saue your bodies yet,

your soules, and eake your good,

And stay the Deuill, that hopes by you

to spill much Christian blood.

God saue our Queene, and keepe in peace
this Iland evermore,

So shall we render vnto him

eternall thanks therefore."

It is hardly to be wondered that Seres afterwards obtained for himself and his son, through the interest of Lord Burghley, the renewal of his patent (of which he had been deprived by Queen Mary) "for the printing of all primers and psalters."

ANTIDOTE AGAINST MELANCHOLY.-An Antidote against Melancholy Made up in Pills. Compounded of Witty Ballads, Jovial Songs and Merry Catches.

These witty Poems though sometime may seem to halt on crutches, Yet they'l all merrily please you for your charge, which not much is. Printed by Mer. Melancholicus, to be sold in London and Westminster. 1661. 4to. 40 leaves.

This is clearly a Shakespearian book, not only because it mentions Falstaff by name, but because it contains two "Catches," one of which is as follows: part of it, as all will remember, is sung by Autolycus in "The Winter's Tale," A. iv. sc. 2.

Jog on, jog on, the Foot path-way,
And merrily hen't the stile-a;
Your merry heart go'es all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a.
Your paltry mony bags of Gold

What need have we to stare for,
When little or nothing soon is told,

And we have the less to care for?
Cast care away; let sorrow cease,
A Figg for Melancholly!

Let's laugh and sing, or if you please,
We'l frolick with sweet Dolly."

Shakespeare only introduces the four first lines, but, as we see, there are eight others that belong to the same catch. Isaac Reed tells that the four first lines are found on p. 69 of "the Antidote against Melancholy;" but they occur in fact on p. 73.

The other Catch is mentioned in "Twelfth Night," A. ii. sc. 3, where Sir Toby Belch says, "Malvolio's a Peg-a-Ramsey, and three merry men be we:" there were several sets of words to the same tune, and in the work before us they are thus given :

"The Wisemen were but seven, ne're more shall be for me;
The Muses were but nine, the Worthies three times three:

And three merry boyes, and three merry boyes are we.

The Vertues were but seven, and three the greater be;
The Cæsars they were twelve, and the fatal sisters three:

And three merry Girles, and three merry Girles are we." Chappell, in his admirable work on English Song and Ballad Music," gives different words on different authority, and does not there refer to the "Antidote against Melancholy," which, however, he had met with. The mention of Falstaff occurs on p. 72 in a Catch, the first stanza of which runs thus characteristically :

"Wilt thou be fatt, Пle tell thee how
Thou shalt quickly do the feat,
And that so plump a thing as thou
Was never yet made up of meat.
Drink off thy Sack! 'twas onely that

Made Bacchus and Jack Falstafe fatt, fatt."

We are without information by whom this collection of Poems, Ballads, Songs and Catches was made; but Thomas Durfey, about sixty years afterwards, imitated the title, when he called his six volumes "Wit and Mirth, or Pills to purge Melancholy," 8vo. 1719-20. This "Antidote against Melancholy, made up in Pills," has not been any where correctly described: we shall therefore be more particular as to its contents, beginning by stating that on the title-page is a very pretty engraving in two compartments, one above the other, representing different classes, gentry and peasantry, drinking and carousing, the first attended by two fiddlers, and the last by a bag-piper. No engraver's name is appended, but it is in a superior style of art, and quite as neat, as anything by Marshall. Following the title-page is an address "To the Reader," in triplets subscribed N. D., at the back of which is a list of "Ballads, Songs, and Catches in this Book," twenty-three in number, besides "forty more merry Catches and Songs."

There are, in fact, only thirty-four "merry Catches and Songs," the last numbered thirty-three; but it is properly thirty-four, as twenty-two is twice repeated: they occupy the last twelve pages.

With reference to No. 5 in the list of Contents, "The Ballad on the Wedding of Arthur of Bradley," it may be remarked that nobody appears to have been aware of the great antiquity of it: it is older than the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, and it is a scrap of a song introduced by Idleness, the Vice, in the Morality of "The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom," which has come down to us in a manuscript dated 1579: the character of the drama, however, carries us back to the reign of Edward VI., or even earlier, and "the Kings most royal Majesty" is mentioned in it. The oldest notice of "Arthur of Bradley" hitherto pointed out is in Dekker's "Honest Whore," 1604: Ben Jonson speaks of it in his "Bartholomew Fair," 1614; Brathwaite, in his "Strappado for the Devil," in 1615, and two lines from it are cited in Gayton's "Festivous Notes on Don Quixote," 1654. Ritson, when he printed it in his "Robin Hood" (Vol. ii. p. 210), was not aware what high claims it possesses as one of the most ancient productions of the kind in our language. Of course, in all the copies that have come down to us it is much modernized and corrupted, but the following