Thank you, Zakariya, and since this little thread has a small but select readership,
I can offer A First Publication event today!
Francis Douce was an antiquarian who lived from 1757 to 1834. He seems to have enjoyed sufficient income to pursue his interests in curios without any pressing need to publish. His dissertation on the Dance of Death appeared in 1833 and a link to a digital version of that handsome volume is in a previous post on this thread.
Douce is credited with a sardonic sense of humour, bequeathing his unpublished papers to the British Museum on condition they were not examined until the 1st January, 1900, some 66 years after his death. It was reported that when this material was examined, it proved to be essentially waste-paper with an insulting note from Douce on top. See
The Museum of Hoaxes. for more detail. Others have argued that the story is an exaggeration and that Douce's bequest was misunderstood as rubbish, because of its fragmentary or popular nature. The Bodleian library received the bulk of his collection, comprising some 19,000 printed volumes. In the attention he showed to chap-books, children's books and broadsheet ballads, Douce was ahead of his time.
The library's dry description of "facetious tales and 'contes galantes'" only lightly disguises the antiquarian's interest in erotica.
My own curiosity about Douce came about in connection with the investigation into the legends surrounding the famous talismanic glass, the Luck of Edenhall. Dr Glyn Davies of the Victoria & Albert Museum has recently revealed that the unpublished Douce papers contain an account of the antiquarian's examination of an illustration of the famous glass by roving "horseback antiquary" Thomas Machell, which Douce dated as early as 1666. Sadly, the drawing - which Douce thought very bad - has disappeared but his testimony extends the reputation of the glass to a much earlier period than the quaint Northern Antiquities which seemed to be everywhere, especially post-Culloden.
I was already aware of the part played by Douce in his retelling of the Edenhall legend in the form of a poem now framed on the wall of Saint Cuthbert's church but I neglected to transcribe it, when I visited the church, mistakenly believing it to be published and well-known. Fortunately, a single photograph of that manuscript had appeared on the Web. My first attempt at turning that into a coherent text was only partly successful; some water-damage had rendered the page hard to decipher and the photograph was not of very high resolution. However, I have this week taken another look at the image,
which can be found here, on a site curated by Martin & Jean Norgate. It appears to be under the aegis of the Geography Department at Portsmouth University.
I believe the following readings are a big improvement on the version(s) published previously
on my site. "Safe" makes better sense than "still" in line four. The word I had long struggled over in line eight is neither "wondrous" nor "sumptuous" but, I am now sure, "handsome!"
In a sense, the whole poem is complementary to Master Dobson but that prevented me seeing that Douce experienced "difficulty" with him, a word I could never fathom. What I had taken to be possibly "holding" is almost certainly "exhibiting." It now reads, "Master John Dobson was the Steward at Edenhall at that time amd made some difficulty in exhibiting the Luck to Mr Douce."
The poem therefore becomes an ironic tribute to the reluctant Dobson, who took such pains to protect the glass, seeing him as one corner of a protective trinity with the fairies of the well and Saint Cuthbert, patron Saint of the church, at the others.
Taken together with the fact that the authorship of the famous 1791 article in The Gentleman's Magazine has been set right, after years of being attributed to William Musgrave, we can begin to see that the resident Dobsons play a larger part in the dissemination of the legend than the absentee Musgraves at this crucial period.
A line of writing at the bottom of the framed poem might reveal the maker and date of the transcription. I was inclined to see it as a facsimile, at least, of what Douce himself wrote, since his name appears in the manner of a signature; however, the comment beneath the poem seems just - if not more - likely to have been written subsequently.
Alternative readings are still welcomed but I think the following represents the first proper publication anywhere of this little poem as a text. It has waited 227 years:
Lines written by
Francis Douce in 1785
Hail to thee, Luck of Edenhall!
May'st thou never break or fall.
May old Dobson's fostering care
Safe preserve thee, Goblet rare!
Holy Cuthbert hear my prayer!
Ye too, fairies of the Well,
Who, if legend right did tell,
Suffer not your handsome cup
From unguarded hands to drop,
But if it totters, hold it up!
Holy Cuthbert hear my prayer
The Luck of Eden be thy care.
Master John Dobson was the
Steward at Edenhall at that
time and made some difficulty
in exhibiting the Luck to
Mr Douce.
8)
edit: One or two literals corrected.
