Warton-Bowle Poetry Notebook

The volume contains:

• Calendarium Doctorum or A Calendar: contayning the Births and Obits. of ye most famous writers of Britain: viz. Poets, Historians, and others (folios 1-7v);
• Latin verses to John Rous, April, 1749/50 (folios 9v-11);
• Canons of Etymology, 19 May 1787 (folios 13v-24);
• Other notes.

The notebook has previously been attributed to Thomas Warton. However, apart from the verse fragment on folio 1v and the drawings at the beginning and end of the book, which are by Warton, the contents of the notebook have been identified as being in the hand of his friend John Bowle (information from Dr David Fairer, Queen's College, Oxford, 1972). Bowle sent these papers to his friend Thomas Warton whose nephew then attributed them to his uncle on finding them amongst Warton's papers.

Pasted into the front of the volume are a cutting from The Times newspaper, 17 November 1910, containing a report on the Warton Lecture on British Poetry, and an engraved caricature portrait of Thomas Warton, 1790. Enclosed loose is an envelope addressed to Ernest Hartland, containing a small sheet of notes on linguistics in the same hand as the bulk of the volume.

Thomas Warton (1728-1790), poet and historian, was born in Basingstoke, Hampshire, on 9 January 1728. He was educated at home until 1744, when he entered Trinity College, Oxford. He graduated BA (1747) and MA (1750), and was elected a probationary fellow of Trinity on 25 May 1752 and perpetual fellow on 6 June 1753.

Warton's first major poem, 'The Pleasures of Melancholy' was published in 1747. As a response to William Mason's poem Isis: an Elegy (1749), Warton published The Triumph of Isis (1750). While he was a serious scholar and poet, he was also a humorist and satirist publishing 'Verses on Miss C-s [Cotes] and Miss W-;t [Wilmot]', anonymously in July 1749 and 'A Panegyric on Oxford Ale' and 'The Pleasures of being out of Debt', which appeared on 31 March 1750 in The Student.

In 1757 Warton was elected professor of poetry at Oxford and on 7 December 1767 took the degree of BD. In 1771 he was elected a fellow of the London Society of Antiquaries. He began his The history of English poetry, from the close of the eleventh to the commencement of the eighteenth centuryin 1769; volume 1 appeared in 1774, volume 2 in 1778, and volume 3 in 1781. Warton was made poet laureate in 1785.

During his lifetime Warton held a number of preferments after being ordained a priest on 10 March 1754. From 1755 to 1774 he was curate of Woodstock, Oxfordshire, appointed chaplain to the Royal Lancashire Regiment, Winchester, in 1762, received the living of Kiddington, Oxfordshire, in 1771, and the perpetual curacy of Hill Farrance, Somerset, in August 1782. He died on 20 May 1790 and was buried in the ante-chapel of Trinity.

Source: Hugh Reid, 'Warton, Thomas (1728-1790)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. By permission of Oxford University Press -- http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/28799.

John Bowle (1725-1788), literary editor, was born on 15 October 1725 at Idmiston, near Salisbury, Wiltshire. He was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, where he took his MA in 1750 and, after ordination, became vicar of Idmiston. On 7 November 1754 he married Elizabeth, daughter of John Elliott, of Winterbourne Cherburgh, Wiltshire. Bowle was elected FSA in 1776.

He published the Troublesome Raigne of King John of 1591 (1764), together with various works by John Marston, and made contributions to Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry and the 1778 Johnson-Steevens edition of Shakespeare. His edition of Don Quixote was published at Salisbury in 1781. Bowle died on 26 October 1788 at Idmiston, and is buried in the church there.

Source: R.W. Truman, 'Bowle, John (1725-1788)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. By permission of Oxford University Press - http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3066.

Former owners: Thomas Warton - 'T. Warton, Trin. Coll., Oxon.' (inscription on folio 1); 'Joseph Wharton, Figlio del Poeta October 1777' (inside front cover), 'Taken out of a MSS. of my late Uncles T. Warton' (folio 24v); 'Joannes Miltonus' (folio 27v); 'This book of MSS. by Thomas Warton was purchased by me from Mr. Kerslake, who obtained it from a Nephew of the Owner and writer, the celebrated Thomas Warton As a Warton memento I value it much. M.I.' (inside front cover, where there is also M.I.'s bookplate); Sir Thomas Phillipps (Phillipps MS 25285); Dr W.A. Copinger; Lot 252 in the Copinger Sale (1910), where it was purchased by Ernest Hartland.

National Library of Scotland MS 2669  (folio 86) 'fragment of etymological notes' by Thomas Warton has been identified as a leaf from the present manuscript (information from Dr David Fairer, Queen's College, Oxford, 1972).