Leighton Library, Dunblane

Scotland's oldest purpose-built independent library founded in 1687

Leighton Library has a 1656 first edition of Poems by Abraham Cowley

Added at 06:23 on 28 July 2024

The Leighton Library has a 1656 first edition of poems by one of the leading English poets of the 17th century, Abraham Cowley, who died #OnThisDay 28 July 1667. When he was just 10 he composed an epic romance written in a six-line stanza, a style of his own invention. The Leighton Library has "Poems: I. Miscellanies. II. The mistress, or, Love verses. III. Pindarique odes. And IV. Davideis". This edition contains the line where he renounces his loyalty to the crown (having for 12 years previously engaged in being the messenger between the exiled queen and the king, creating and deciphering coded messages for them): "yet when the event of battle, and the unaccountable will of God has determined the controversie, and that we have submitted to the conditions of the Conqueror, we must lay down our Pens as well as Arms, we must march out of our Cause itself, and dismantle that, as well as our own Towns and Castles, of all the Works and Fortifications as Wit and Reason by which we defended it."

< Leighton Library has 1768 edition of "Oeuvres de Maupertuis" by Pierre Louis Maupertuis Leighton Library has 1833 "A practical view of the prevailing religious system of professed Christians, in the higher and middle classes in this country, contrasted with real Christianity" by William Wilberforce & Daniel Wilson >