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- THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM 15
and *Tottel’s Miscellany* had a numerous progeny. Nor was Jaggard the only publisher arbitrarily to assign the whole of a miscellaneous anthology to some one popular pen.
Opportunities for gathering material for such anthologies abounded. Printed books, for example, novels and plays, which were interspersed with songs, could always be raided with impunity. But it was from manuscript sources that the anthological publishers sought their most attractive wares. Short poems circulated very freely in manuscript copies through Elizabethan England. An author would offer a friend or patron a poetic effusion in his own handwriting. Fashion led the recipient to multiply transcripts at will as gifts for other worshippers of the Muses. There were amateurs who collected these flying leaves in albums or commonplace books.¹ The author exerted no definable right over his work after the MS. left his hand. His name was frequently omitted from the transcript. A publisher, in search of ‘copy’, recognized no obligation to consult the writer of unprinted verse before he sent it to press. It might be to his interest to enlist the aid of an amateur collector in extending his collections, and to him he might be ready to make some acknowledgement. But the author’s claim to mention was usually disregarded altogether. As often as not, both collector and publisher were in ignorance of the name of the author of unsigned poems which
¹ Numerous manuscript collections of verse, which were formed by amateurs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are extant in the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, and in private hands. Mr. Henry Huth printed for private circulation in 1870 interesting specimens of such collections in private hands, in the volume entitled *Inedited Poetical Miscellanies*, 1584–1700. Some Elizabethans seem to have collected with an eye to business, and to have deliberately handed their collections over to publishers for some unknown consideration. Such an one was John Bodenham, to whom the publishers of *England’s Helicon* (1600), *Belvedere* (1600), and other miscellanies of the time, acknowledged indebtedness. Bodenham was hailed in a preliminary sonnet before *Belvedere* as ‘First causer and collector of these flowers’.
Manuscript verse.
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