MSS 696
A memorandum book of miscellaneous verse and prose, compiled by Judge John Saffin (1632-1710), of New England, originally in blue velvet. c.1665-1708.
Donated in December 1894 by Laura H. and Mary Carpenter, of Wakefield, Rhode Island.
This volume edited as John Saffin his Book (1665-1708), ed. Caroline Hazard (New York, 1928).
[unspecified page numbers]
• WoH 43.5: Sir Henry Wotton, The Character of a Happy Life (‘How happy is he born and taught’)
Copy, headed ‘The Happy Man’.
Edited from this MS in Hazard, pp. 123-4.
First published in Sir Thomas Overbury, A Wife, 5th impression (London, 1614). Reliquiae Wottonianae (London, 1651), pp. 522-3. Hannah (1845), pp. 28-31. Some texts of this poem discussed in C.F. Main, ‘Wotton's “The Character of a Happy Life”’, The Library, 5th Ser. 10 (1955), 270-4, and in Ted-Larry Pebworth, ‘New Light on Sir Henry Wotton's “The Character of a Happy Life”’, The Library, 5th Ser. 33 (1978), 223-6 (plus plates).
[unspecified page numbers]
• RoJ 598: John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, Upon Nothing (‘Nothing! thou elder brother even to Shade’)
Copy of lines 1-2, 44-51, headed ‘A Poeme upon Nothing’.
Edited from this MS in John Saffin his Book (1665-1708), ed. Caroline Hazard (New York, 1928), p. 45, and also in Norman S. Grabo, ‘The Profligate and the Puritan’, N&Q, 207 (October 1962), 392-3.
First published, as a broadside, [in London, 1679]. Poems on Several Occasions (‘Antwerp’, 1680). Vieth, pp. 118-20. Walker, pp. 62-4. Harold Love, ‘The Text of Rochester's “Upon Nothing”’, Centre for Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Monash University, Occasional Papers 1 (1985). Love, pp. 46-8.
passim
• SiP 242: Sir Philip Sidney, Extracts
Approximately 72 extracts from Arcadia.
Edited in Hazard, passim. Discussed in Jessie A. Coffee, ‘Arcadia to America: Sir Philip Sidney and John Saffin’, American Literature, 45 (1973-4), 100-4.