les and the other with the other, advertised in a contemporary
newspaper list of books on sale by the publisher Brooke. In Lowndes's
Bibliog. Manual by Bohn, _sub voce_ "Wit," the two books are
given as distinct; but then _Sportive Wit or the Muses'
Merriment_ is there dated 1656, while there is no notice of an
edition of _Wit and Drollery, Jovial Poems,_ till 1661. Though
I leave the matter in doubt, some collector of Facetiac may know all
about it. In any case, if _Wit and Drollery_ was not the
identical book condemned, it is of interest to us as being one of
Phillips's editing at the same moment.--Donne, who figures so
strangely in _Wit and Drollery,_ had been dead twenty-five
years, but was accessible in various editions and reprints of his
Poems. The other three poets named in the title-page as the chief
authors of the pieces--Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and
Davenant--were still alive and publishing for themselves. Indeed the
_Musarum Delitice, or Muses' Recreation,_ consisting of pieces
by Mennes and Smith, had been published by Herringman only the year
before (1655), and was in its second edition in 1658; and it may have
been the success of this and Smith in it. Mennes, a stout book that
led to Phillips's publication and to the use of the names of Mennes
Royalist sea-captain, who had served with Prince Rupert, and was in
exile at our present date, became Chief Comptroller of the Navy after
the Restoration and lived to 1670. Smith was a Devonshire clergyman,
of Royalist antecedents, who had complied with the existing powers
and retained his living. After the Restoration he had promotion in
the Church: and he died in 1667.]

Less unsatisfactory to Milton, must hare been the literary
appearances about the same time of his elder nephew, Edward Phillips.
On the same day on which the stationer Nathaniel Brooke had
registered _Wit and Drollery_ edited by John Phillips, i.e. on
Jan. 30, 1655-6, he had registered two tales or small novels called
"_The Illustrious Shepherdess_" and "_The Imperious
Brother_" both "written originally in Spanish and now Englished by
Edward Phillips, Gent."[1] The first of these translations, both from
the Spanish of Juan Perez de Montalvan (1602-1638), is dedicated by
Phillips to the Marchioness of Dorchester, in what Godwin calls "an
extraordinary style of fustian and bombast."[2] With the exception,
of such affectation in style, which Phillips afterwards threw off,
there is nothing ill