Contents

Title Page

Note on the Author and Editor

Chronology of Jane Austen’s Life

Chronology of Jane Austen’s Times

Introduction

Note on the Text

JANE AUSTEN

Song (1)

Epitaph

Song (2)

Song

Ode to Pity

Song (1)

Song (2)

‘This Little Bag’

Lines written by Jane Austen for … a niece …

‘Oh! Mr Best, you’re very bad’

On Sir Home Popham’s sentence – April 1807

To Miss Bigg, previous to her marriage …

On the same occasion, but not sent

To the Memory of Mrs Lefroy …

‘Alas, poor Brag, thou boastful Game’

‘My dearest Frank’

‘In Measured Verse …’

‘I’ve a Pain in my Head’

On … the Marriage of ‘Mr Gell … to Miss Gill’

‘I am in a Dilemma’

‘Between Session and Session’

‘When Stretched on One’s Bed’

On the Marriage of Miss Camilla Wallop …

Riddles

To Miss—. Charade

Written at Winchester on Tuesday the 15th July 1817

JAMES BEATTIE

The Hermit

ISAAC HAWKINS BROWNE

from A Pipe of Tobacco: Imitation 5

ROBERT BURNS

Mary Morison

Song: Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary

Highland Mary

LORD BYRON

from The Giaour

from The Bride of Abydos

from The Corsair

THOMAS CAMPBELL

from The Pleasures of Hope

WILLIAM COWPER

from Truth

Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk …

Epitaph on a Hare

The Task

from Book I, The Sofa

from Book IV, The Winter Evening

from Book VI, The Winter Walk at Noon

from Tirocinium: or, A Review of Schools

GEORGE CRABBE

Tales, 1812

from Tale 3, The Gentleman Farmer

from Tale 11, Edward Shore

DAVID GARRICK

A Riddle

JOHN GAY

The Hare and Many Friends

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

‘When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly’

THOMAS GRAY

from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

JAMES MERRICK

The Chameleon: A Fable after Monsieur de la Motte

JOHN MILTON

from L’Allegro

from Paradise Lost, Book V

THOMAS MOSS

The Beggar’s Petition

ALEXANDER POPE

from An Essay on Criticism

Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady

from An Essay on Man, Epistle 1

MATTHEW PRIOR

from Henry and Emma: A Poem, upon the Model of the Nut-Brown Maid

ANON

‘Robin Adair’

SIR WALTER SCOTT

from The Lay of the Last Minstrel Canto II

from Marmion, Canto VI

from The Lady of the Lake, Canto II

ROBERT SOUTHEY

from The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo, Proem

JAMES THOMSON

The Seasons: from Spring

WILLIAM WHITEHEAD

The Je ne scai quoi

Notes

Copyright

Note on the Author and Editor

JANE AUSTEN was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon, Hampshire, to the Rev. George Austen and his wife Cassandra. She was the seventh of their eight children, and their second daughter. When she was nine she was sent, with her sister Cassandra, to the Abbey School, Reading, where she stayed a year or so, returning home to be largely taught by her father. She began writing prose and verse parodies and burlesques when she was eleven, and also took part in home threatricals. In 1801 the Austens moved to Bath (which often features in her novels) and, after the death of the Rev. Austen in 1805, to Southampton and, finally, Chawton, near Alton, Hampshire where Jane Austen’s brother Edward had inherited an estate. Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, by which time Jane Austen was already revising Pride and Prejudice (published 1813) and drafting Mansfield Park (1814). She began Emma in 1814; by the time it was published in 1815 she had begun Persuasion (finished August 1816), which was published with Northanger Abbey – revised from the earlier Susan also in 1816 – the following year. In May 1817 she moved to Winchester for treatment for an illness that had been evident for some twelve months or so, and was probably Addison’s disease. She died on 18 July 1817 and was buried in Winchester Cathedral.

DOUGLAS BROOKS-DAVIES was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School, Crosby, and Brasenose College, Oxford. He was Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester until 1993 and is now an Honorary Research Fellow there. The founder editor of Manchester University Press’s Literature in Context series, he has published widely on Renaissance, eighteenth and nineteenth-century English literature. His books include Number and Pattern in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Routledge, 1973); Pope’s ‘Dunciad’ and the Queen of the Night (Manchester U. P., 1985); Oedipal Hamlet (Macmillan, 1989); and Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations’: A Critical Study (Penguin, 1989); his editions include: Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century (1992); Spenser’s ‘Fairy Queen’ (1996) (both Dent); Spenser; Selected Shorter Poems (Longman, 1995); and editions of Alexander Pope (1996), Robert Herrick (1996) and Four Metaphysical Poets (1997) for Everyman Poetry. His edition of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between was published by Penguin in 1997.