Merton College, Oxford

MS D. 1. 2

An octavo miscellany of verse and prose, in English and Latin, closely written from both ends in several hands, 144 leaves (plus entries on inside covers), in contemporary calf.

Owned (name inscribed on f. 1r), and probably compiled in part, by one Thomas Watson.

c.1680s.

Formerly MS P. 3. 1.

f. 12v

HrJ 293: Sir John Harington, Of writing with double pointing ('Dames are indude with vertues excellent?')

Copy, headed Of Women in a double sense.

First published in 1618, Book I, Nos. 33 and 35. McClure Nos. 34 and 36, pp. 161-2. Kilroy, Book I, No. 65, pp. 116-17.

f. 13r

HrJ 162: Sir John Harington, Of a Preacher that sings Placebo ('A smooth-tong'd Preacher that did much affect')

Copy, headed On a Preacher.

First published in 1618, Book II, No. 56. McClure No. 152, p. 207. Kilroy, Book II, No. 90, p. 163.

f. 144

JnB 429: Ben Jonson, A Satyricall Shrub ('A Womans friendship! God whom I trust in')

Copy of a version of lines 17-24, untitled, here beginning Trust not y^t thing call'd woman, she is worse, and subscribed Rochester.

Edited from this MS in The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven & London, 1968), p. 159. Collated in Beal.

First published (in an incomplete 24-line version) in The Vnder-wood (xx) in Workes (London, 1640). Herford & Simpson, VIII, 171-2. Complete 32-line version first published in Grace Ioppolo, The Monckton-Milnes Manuscript and the Truest Version of Ben Jonson's A Satyricall Shrubb, Ben Jonson Journal, 16 (May 2009), 117-31 (pp. 125-6). Some later texts of this poem discussed in Peter Beal, Ben Jonson and Rochester's Rodomontade on his Cruel Mistress, RES, NS 29 (1978), 320-4. See also Harold F. Brooks, A Satyricall Shrub, TLS (11 December 1969), p. 1426.