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WYCHERLEY, William (1640-1716). Miscellany Poems: as Satyrs, Epistles, Love-Verses Songs, Sonnets, &c. London: C. Brome, J. Taylor, and B. Tooke, 1704. Folio. With the mezzotint frontispiece portrait of Wycherley by Lely. [xlviii], 1-438 pp. Approximately 12 5 / 8 x 8”. Bound to style in early 20th century paneled calf (with light brown onlays), boards double-ruled in gilt with gilt floral cornerpieces, spine tooled in gilt in compartments, 2 burgundy gilt morocco lettering labels, five raised bands, gilt board edges and turn-ins, marbled endleaves, all edges gilt (front board detached yet present, some wear to spine and boards, minor occasional thumbsoiling in text). Very good. FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE (with title-page dated 1704, and without the later issue correction slip “The End” pasted over the “The End of the First Volume” (this was intended to be a two-volume work, but the second volume was abandoned). “Wycherley still had a mass of unpublished literary manuscripts of poems, scraps of poems, and the like. In the late 1690s, he tried to make some money by printing some of these poems, and the bookseller Samuel Briscoe issued proposals for a subscription volume in 1696. They ended up in a dispute over money, and Wycherley was again arrested for debt. It was not until 1704 that Wycherley’s large folio of Miscellany Poems appeared. It was badly misjudged. Poems on a woman’s “Fair Back-Side” and on another’s “Fine Breasts” were entirely at odds with the new, chaster sensibility, and for its preface the world has a thirty-page torrent of abuse on those “who were my Critics before they were my Readers…” (Oxford, DNB). Pforzheimer 1101. Wither to Prior 1085.