Note 135 — CALAMITIES OF AUTHORS: (continued 5)

The author explains the nature of his book in his title-page when he calls it “A Chorographicall Description of tracts, rivers, mountaines, forests, and other parts of this renowned Isle of Great Britaine, with intermixture of the most remarquable stories, antiquities, wonders, rarityes, pleasures, and commodities of the same; digested in a Poem.” The maps with which it is illustrated are curious for the impersonations of the nymphs of wood and water, the sylvan gods, and other characters of the poem; to which the learned Selden supplied notes. Ellis calls it “a wonderful work, exhibiting at once the learning of an historian, an antiquary, a naturalist, and a geographer, and embellished by the imagination of a poet.”—Ed.