Author: Thomas Randolph

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2015-06-04

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 9781330021170

Excerpt from The Poems and Amyntas of Thomas Randolph It seems now as though the prediction of the seventeenth century editors of the Clievelandi Vindicia that Randolph would "lie embalmed in his own native wax" had indeed come true. In general when the public has seen fit to consign a writer to oblivion it is wisest not to dispute its sentence. Yet in the present instance I feel that the judgment of his contemporaries, rather than that of the present day, is the correct one, and that Randolph is deserving of a much larger audience than he now has. Wholly aside from the fact that poetry, particularly old-fashioned poetry, no longer appeals to the general reader, there are several reasons for the neglect into which the works of Randolph have fallen. One is that after his death an admiring brother published whatever of his he could find, burying the honey in the wax and making no distinction between his early school exercises and his later poems. Because of this the juvenile efforts of the school-boy are often condemned as though they were the work of his mature age. Another fact which has kept him from being better known is that copies of his works are now hard to secure; one must read him either in the rare early editions, or in the astoundingly inaccurate reprint of W. C. Hazlitt which is itself long out of print. It is to do away with the difficulty of securing a text that this volume, containing about one third of Randolph's extant works, has been prepared. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.