Note 11 — INTRODUCTION TO JOHN CLEVELAND.

The extraordinary complexity of the editions of Cleveland has been glanced at above. The following summary will at least give the reader some idea of the facts, and the two original Prefaces will extra-illustrate these facts with some views of causes. It need only be added here that the principle of the collection now given is, of course, to exclude everything that is certainly not Cleveland's: and, in giving what certainly and probably is his, to arrange the items as far as possible in the order of their publication in the author's lifetime, though the impossibility of working with an actually complete collection of all the issues before one may have occasioned some error here. In the following abstract only the Poems are referred to, as they alone concern us.

The original collection is contained in The Character of a London Diurnal [prose] with several select Poems, London, 1647. This was reprinted in the same year and the next so often that some admit thirteen different issues (of course, as was usual at the time, sometimes only 'stop-press' batches with slight changes made in what is practically the same edition), while no one I think has allowed less than five. There are substantive additions in several of these, but the singular characteristic of the whole, and indeed of Cleveland's published Poems generally, is that part of the matter, even in the very earliest issue, is certainly not his: and that in very early forms these pieces were coolly headed 'Uncertain Authors'. The extent to which this jumbling and misattributing went on in the seventeenth century is generally if not very precisely known from the famous cases of Sic Vita (v. inf., on Bishop King, &c.), and of the epitaph sometimes assigned to Browne, more usually to Jonson. Another almost equally strange, though perhaps not so commonly known, is the assignment of some of the poems of a writer of position like the dramatist James Shirley to Carew. But Cleveland must have been rather exceptionally careless of his work during his life, and he was treated with exceptional impudence (see Williamson's Preface) after his death. The process went on in 1651, to which two issues are assigned, with three or four pretty certainly spurious additions, while 1653 and 1654 each saw two more, the last being printed again in 1656 and 1657. This last was also the last printed in Cleveland's lifetime.

But he was hardly dead when in 1659 two different issues, each of them many times reprinted, took the most astounding liberties with his name. The first foisted in more than thirty pieces by Robert Fletcher, the translator of Martial. The other, calling itself Cleveland Revived, contains the remarkable and perfectly frank explanation, given below, of the principles on which the work of Mr. Williamson was conducted, and the critical notions which directed his 'virtuous endeavours'.