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the meeter and poesie" of the King's psalms,[1] with a view to publication, and an edition the text quite different, however, from that of the Museum MS. appeared in 1631. Charles may have also planned an edition of the poems, but decided afterward not to expose them thus to the attacks of Puritan critics. The corrections by the King, and the proper placing (in a MS. which now contains no blank pages) of the poems copied by Charles and Carey, suggest a date somewhere between 1616 and 1625. The care with which the collection is arranged, revised, and the pieces which had already appeared in print crossed through, makes it altogether probable that James himself planned to have it published; it may at least be accepted as a correct and final text for the poems which it contains.
Of these, the pieces hitherto printed (from other MS. sources) have already been roughly indicated in the Preface, and it remains merely to give a fuller account of the two collections in which most of them appear.
Nine sonnets — corresponding, in the order in which they are printed, to XV, V, VI, II, X, VIII, XI, XII, and IX of the Amatoria are found in the Publications of the Percy Society, 1844, Vol. XV, pp. 32-37. They are arranged as a single poem, and form a part of a series of extracts, entitled Poetical Miscellanies, selected and edited by J. C. Halliwell from a much larger collection in a MS. volume, 12mo., owned at the time by Andrews, a Bristol bookseller.[2] At the end of the sonnets is the colophon, "Finis, Sir Thomas Areskine of Gogar, Knighte" a signature which has served completely to conceal their actual authorship. Sir Thomas Areskine, or Erskine, was either the King's friend and boyhood companion of that name, who became Earl of Kelley in 1619, or his grandson and namesake, who became the second earl in i639.[3] The variants in the Percy Society
- ↑ Letter of Charles to the Archbishop of St. Andrews, Earl of Stirling's Reg. Royal Letters, Edinburgh, 1885, Vol. I, p. 73.
- ↑ Halliwell's preface to the Miscellanies.
- ↑ It is possibly of significance that a complication of marriages placed the younger Erskine in the relationship of grandson to James Leviston, though the two were not far from the same age. (Cf. D.N.B.)
