The Historie of Samson

Book Description

London: Printed by M.F. for Iohn Marriott, 1631. [viii], 142, [2]pp., sm. 4to. With the terminal blank leaf; this and the title slightly soiled, a couple of headlines just shaved, but a nice copy. Bound with three other Quarles first editions (see below), in circa 1810 half calf over grey boards, spine blind-tooled and gilt-lettered, with a note from the same period on the front free endpaper: “Francis Quarles - Original Editions of 1. History of Queen Esther. 2. Historie of Sampson 1631. 3. Job Militant 1624. 4. A Feast for the Worms set foorth in a Poem of the History of Jonah 1620. All very rare - and are separately priced in the London Catalogue at £1.5 & £1.11.6 - Each.” First edition, one of the less common of Quarles’s narrative poems on Biblical subjects, written in rhymed couplets: . . . The eternall glory Of his Heroicke acts: His life, His death: Quicken my Muse with thy diviner breath.Of the four poems contained in this volume, The Historie of Samson is the only one to have survived the vagaries of time and the binder’s knife intact. Job Militant, 1624, is complete and a good fresh copy, but the sidenotes have been substantially cropped. Queen Esther lacks the title and at least one leaf at the end, and A Feast for Wormes, 1620 is cropped similarly to Job Militant, although less severely and with only a few side-notes affected. It is also without the last six leaves of “Pentelogia,” as are a number of other surviving copies; leaf M4, the last present in this copy, ends with “Finis,” and it is possible that the final six leaves were an afterthought, not issued with all copies. In any event the volume, with all its faults, preserves one rare first edition, and is an agreeable example of Roxburghe-era book collecting. STC 20549; Grolier, Wither to Prior 702 (and for the other three works see Wither to Prior 691-693).

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