Rhode Island Historical Society

MSS 696

A memorandum book of miscellaneous verse and prose, compiled by Judge John Saffin (1632-1710), of New England, originally in blue velvet. c.1665-1708.

Donated in December 1894 by Laura H. and Mary Carpenter, of Wakefield, Rhode Island.

This volume edited as John Saffin his Book (1665-1708), ed. Caroline Hazard (New York, 1928).

[unspecified page numbers]

WoH 43.5: Sir Henry Wotton, The Character of a Happy Life ('How happy is he born and taught')

Copy, headed The Happy Man.

Edited from this MS in Hazard, pp. 123-4.

First published in Sir Thomas Overbury, A Wife, 5th impression (London, 1614). Reliquiae Wottonianae (London, 1651), pp. 522-3. Hannah (1845), pp. 28-31. Some texts of this poem discussed in C.F. Main, Wotton's The Character of a Happy Life, The Library, 5th Ser. 10 (1955), 270-4, and in Ted-Larry Pebworth, New Light on Sir Henry Wotton's The Character of a Happy Life, The Library, 5th Ser. 33 (1978), 223-6 (plus plates).

[unspecified page numbers]

RoJ 598: John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, Upon Nothing ('Nothing! thou elder brother even to Shade')

Copy of lines 1-2, 44-51, headed A Poeme upon Nothing.

Edited from this MS in Hazard, p. 45, and also in Norman S. Grabo, The Profligate and the Puritan, N&Q, 207 (October 1962), 392-3.

First published, as a broadside, [in London, 1679]. Poems on Several Occasions (Antwerp, 1680). Vieth, pp. 118-20. Walker, pp. 62-4. Harold Love, The Text of Rochester's Upon Nothing, Centre for Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Monash University, Occasional Papers 1 (1985). Love, pp. 46-8.

passim

SiP 242: Sir Philip Sidney, Extracts ('')

Approximately 72 extracts from Arcadia.

Edited in Hazard, passim. Discussed in Jessie A. Coffee, Arcadia to America: Sir Philip Sidney and John Saffin, American Literature, 45 (1973-4), 100-4.