AN. COLLINS
DIVINE SONGS AND MEDITACIONS
(1653)
Selected, with an
Introduction, by
Stanley N. Stewart
Publication Number 94
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
University of California
Los Angeles
1961
GENERAL EDITORS
Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles
Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles
Lawrence Clark Powell, Clark Memorial Library
ADVISORY EDITORS
John Butt, University of Edinburgh
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles
James Sutherland, University College, London
H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY
Edna C. Davis, Clark Memorial Library
In 1815, the library of Thomas Park, which had already passedfrom Park to Thomas Hill to Longman, was sold. In the catalog ofthat collection, a volume of devotional and autobiographical versewritten by one Anne Collins, Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653),was described as “so rare as to be probably unique.”[1] That sameyear, Longman and his associates published an anthology of “OldBooks in English Literature, Revived,” edited by Sir Egerton Brydgesand entitled Restituta. Brydges, who acknowledged the help ofPark in editing the four volume work,[2] reprinted long passages fromthe Songs and Meditacions. By mid-century, the book had passedthrough the possession of James Midgeley, Sir Mark Masterman Sykes,Thomas Thorpe,[3] and Richard Heber. In 1878, Alexander Dyce reprintedall but the last stanza of “Another Song exciting to spirituallMirth,” and some twenty years later, S. Austin Allibone includedreference to Anne Collins in his Critical Dictionary of English Literature.By this time, however, the remaining copy of Divine Songsand Meditacions seems to have slipped from sight; scholars were along time finding it, but in 1924, the “unique” copy bearing the autographof Thomas Park was removed from the library at Britwell Courtand sold by Sotheby to A. S. W. Rosenbach, who acted in behalf ofHenry E. Huntington, in whose memorial library it now remains. Ifa second edition of the work ever existed, as claimed by Allibone,[4]it has vanished (to my knowledge, without a further trace); for allpractical purposes, Anne Collins and her Divine Songs and Meditacionsare unknown even to scholars of seventeenth-century literature.
Though it appears that the verses of Anne Collins have beenspared extinction, it is problematic whether they will escape obscurity.Dr. Johnson and Warton did not mention them. Yet knowledgeable,if lesser, men found the Songs and Meditacions worthreading. We may infer, for example, that Thomas Park, who waspraised by Southey as the most distinguished authority on Old-Englishpoetry, admired the Songs, for it seems probable that herecommended to Brydges the passages finally anthologized in Restituta.In any cas