[Rarebooks] fa: FRANCIS QUARLES - DIVINE POEMS 1638

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, September 21. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/ng4g4xr

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

Francis Quarles: Divine Poems: Containing the History of Jonah, Ester, Job, Samson. Sions Sonets, Elegies. Written and newly augmented, by Fra. Quarles. London: Printed by M[iles] F[lesher] for J. Marriot, and are to be sold at his shop in St. Dunstans, Church-yard in Fleet-street, 1638. First edition thus. Small  8vo (15 cm) in modern quarter morocco and cloth boards; with the additional engraved title-page and the initial leaf opposite ("The Minde of the Frontispice[sic]"), and the terminal leaf ("Her Epitaph"); [18], 266, [6], 267-526, [4] pp. ESTC S2290; STC 20536.

An early printing of Quarles's Divine Poems (originally published in 1630) and the first to contain his "Mildreiados." Francis Quarles (1592-1644) served abroad in the suite of James I's daughter Elizabeth after her marriage to the Elector Palatine and was later made Chronologer to the City of London. His devout, metaphysical poetry strongly appealed to Puritans, but he himself sided with the Royalists at the outbreak of the Civil Wars — not a prudent or popular choice in the Parliamentary stronghold of London. He was denounced and arrested, and many of his manuscripts destroyed. He died penniless soon after. The poems collected here, most with separate title-pages, are: Pentelogia; Hadassa; Job Militant; Sions Son[n]ets; Sions Elegies; Alphabet of Elegies; Elegie upon the Reverend, Learned, and my Honoured Friend, Doctor Wilson, of the Rolles; Mildreados, to the Blessed Memory of that faire Manuscript of Vertue and unblemisht Honour, Mildred, La[dy]. Luckyn...

Fairly unobtrusive ex-library markings (gilt shelf number on spine, library slips on front paste-down and verso of initial leaf); mild toning to the leaves with darkening to the edges and occasional mostly light damp-staining; paper repair to the corner of the first leaf, a few other small paper repairs; otherwise generally quite clean and crisp, firmly bound. A former owner has tipped in a woodcut portrait of the author to the verso of the frontispiece.