Miscellany Poems: As Satyrs, Epistles, Love-Verses, Songs, Sonnets &c.

Notes

The first printing of playwright William Wycherley's poems, which were written throughout his life but first mooted as a subscription volume in 1696, although a dispute over money with his publishers and Wycherley's imprisonment for debt delayed it for 8 years. 'It was badly misjudged. Poems on a woman's 'Fair Back-Side' and on another's 'Fine Breasts' were entirely at odds with the new, chaster sensibility, and for its preface the work has a thirty-page torrent of abuse on those 'who were my Critics before they were my Readers' (ODNB). Later issues - including Pforzheimer's large-paper presentation copy - have the 'The End' pasted over the 'The End of The First Part' present here on the final leaf; a second volume was intended but not produed until Pope eventually edited a posthumous collection in 1729. Copies of the first volume remaining after the subscription was exhausted were also issued with a new title-page in 1706.
The frontispiece is a fine aquatint by John Smith after Peter Lely, depicting then then 63-year-old Wycherley as a handsome young rake. 'This is one of the most famous of literary mezzotints and is rarely found in such magnificient state prefixed to the volume as intended' (Pforzheimer).