[Sidney Psalms MS]
Copy of Psalms 1-150, in a calligraphic italic hand, with elaborate and partly coloured ornamentation, with a title-page, ‘The Psalmes of David Done into English Verse, By the moste noble and vertuouse gentellman sr: Phillipp Sydney knight’, subscribed ‘W. H.’, 228 folio leaves (plus blanks), in contemporary calf gilt (rebacked) bearing the initials ‘T M’. c.1595-1605.
SiP 77: Sir Philip Sidney, The Psalms of David
The early owner ‘T M’ possibly Thomas Moffett (1553-1604), poet and physician to the Countess of Pembroke, or perhaps Tobie Matthew (1544?-1628), Archbishop of York: see H.R. Woudhuysen, ‘Astrophel and Stella 75: A New Text’, RES, NS 37 (August 1986), 388-92. Later apparently in the library of Warwick Castle. Sotheby's, 24 November 1969, lot 135. Owned before 1976 by Mr John Goelet when it was on deposit at Harvard (*69M-142). Sotheby's, 21-22 July 1980, lot 574, to Colin Franklin.
Described in G.F. Waller, ‘The Text and Manuscript Variants of the Countess of Pembroke's Psalms’, RES, NS 26 (1975), 1-18. A facsimile example is in the Sotheby's 1980 sale catalogue. Two microfilms are in the British Library: RP 412 and RP 2051.
Psalms 1-43 translated by Sidney. Psalms 44-150 translated by his sister, the Countess of Pembroke. First published complete in London, 1823, ed. S.W. Singer. Psalms 1-43, without the Countess of Pembroke's revisions, edited in Ringler, pp. 265-337. Psalms 1-150 in her revised form edited in The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, ed. J.C.A. Rathmell (New York, 1963). Psalms 44-150 also edited in The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke (1988), Vol. II.