Produced by Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper, Stephen Hutcheson, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
_AN. COLLINS_ DIVINE SONGS AND MEDITACIONS (1653)
Selected, with an Introduction, by Stanley N. Stewart
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California Los Angeles 1961
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_
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_
In 1815, the library of Thomas Park, which had already passed from Park to Thomas Hill to Longman, was sold. In the catalog of that collection, a volume of devotional and autobiographical verse written by one Anne Collins, _Divine Songs and Meditacions_ (1653), was described as “so rare as to be probably unique.”[1] That same year, Longman and his associates published an anthology of “Old Books in English Literature, Revived,” edited by Sir Egerton Brydges and entitled _Restituta_. Brydges, who acknowledged the help of Park in editing the four volume work,[2] reprinted long passages from the _Songs and Meditacions_. By mid-century, the book had passed through the possession of James Midgeley, Sir Mark Masterman Sykes, Thomas Thorpe,[3] and Richard Heber. In 1878, Alexander Dyce reprinted all but the last stanza of “Another Song exciting to spirituall Mirth,” and some twenty years later, S. Austin Allibone included reference to Anne Collins in his _Critical Dictionary of English Literature_. By this time, however, the remaining copy of _Divine Songs and Meditacions_ seems to have slipped from sight; scholars were a long time finding it, but in 1924, the “unique” copy bearing the autograph of Thomas Park was removed from the library at Britwell Court and sold by Sotheby to A. S. W. Rosenbach, who acted in behalf of Henry E. Huntington, in whose memorial library it now remains. If a second edition of the work ever existed, as claimed by Allibone,[4] it has vanished (to my knowledge, without a further trace); for all practical purposes, Anne Collins and her _Divine Songs and Meditacions_ are unknown even to scholars of seventeenth-century literature.