Prose and verse essay in praise of wine, dedicated to Henry St. John, later Viscount Bolingbroke, by Joshua Barnes

  • This material is held at
  • Reference
      GB 206 Brotherton Collection MS Lt 97
  • Dates of Creation
      1708
  • Name of Creator
  • Language of Material
      English Latin Greek
  • Physical Description
      1 vol. (108 ff.), manuscript. The main text is written in a single neat eighteenth-century hand with elegant pen and ink illustrations on ff.17r-94r only with its own differing foliation. Ff.1v-16v and 94v-108v are blank. F.1r contains badly-written pencilled notes on the manuscript's ownership in a twentieth-century hand dated 1959. Bound in contemporary black morocco, gilt-embossed in geometrical and floral patterns, with gilt folio edges and Dutch red floral end-leaves.

Scope and Content

Contains 90 eighteenth-century English poems by Joshua Barnes in praise of wine, occasioned by Bolingbroke's gift to him of a hogshead of 'red Portugal' in the late summer of 1705. The text is interspersed with English prose and many quotations from Latin and Greek classical authors with some translations of the same into English and references given in the margins.

Administrative / Biographical History

Joshua Barnes (1654-1712) was a poet and classicist, latterly professor of Greek at Oxford University. Henry St. John (1678-1751) was a statesman who later became Viscount Bolingbroke. For fuller details of both men's lives and achievements see the Dictionary of National Biography.

Access Information

Access is unrestricted.

Acquisition Information

Purchased from Quaritch's on 31 July 1993.

Note

Mainly in English, but with some Latin and classical Greek.

Other Finding Aids

The poems are indexed in the BCMSV database http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/spcoll/bcmsv/bcmvlink.htm#bclt97

Additional Information

There is a detailed description of the whole manuscript, its occasion, provenance, and literary and physical features held with it.