4to (260 x 170 mm). Engraved title-page, laid down. (Marginal repair to A6, spotting to a few leaves, intermittent dampstaining in lower margin.) Early 19th century diced calf gilt, edges stained red (splitting with separations to front joint, fore-corners and spine ends rubbed, evidence of bookplate removal on front pastedown); morocco pull-off case. Provenance: attributed to John Milton (manuscript notations); by descent Elizabeth Minshull Milton (ca 1637-1727); aquired by Joshua Eddowes (1724-1811), bookseller; sold to Rev. Stedman; Oetavius Gilchrist (1779-1823), celebrated Antiquary (ownership signature on title-page dated 1803); penciled notation on on p.2 predating William Ford's note (see inscription); William Ford (1771-1832), Manchester bookseller (note on front free endpaper); Sotheby's (23 February 1856, lot 108); to Patrick; Henry Huth (1815-1878), English bibliophile, sold; Sotheby's (23 November 1911, lot 1054); to J & J Leighton, bookseller's; Maggs (1918, Catalogue 369, Item 76; possibly their printed description on front free endpaper); possibly sold to Dr. Otto Orren Fisher (1881-1961); Charles Sawyer, bookseller; purchased by Lucius Wilmerding; his sale, Parke-Bernet (27 November 1950, Lot 88); Sotheby's (12 November 1989, Sale 5952, Lot 129); purchased by the present owner.

SECOND EDITION OF BOOK I, FIRST EDITION OF BOOK II, with catchword "but" on lr and A6V with commendatory poem. "The second edition, though a page-for-page reprint of the first, was entirely reset and contains corrections in the text" (Haywood).

A CELEBRATED AND CONTROVERSIAL COPY OF BROWNE'S BRITANNIA'S PASTORALS, WITH APPROXIMATELY 160 EARLY MANUSCRIPT ANNOTATIONS LONG ATTRIBUTED TO JOHN MILTON

This copy of William Browne's Britannia's Pastorals ranks among the most celebrated—and most debated—annotated books associated with John Milton. Containing approximately 160 early manuscript marginalia throughout, it has, since at least the early nineteenth century, been identified by successive owners, booksellers, and scholars as Milton's personal copy. Although the annotations have never been accompanied by a signature or explicit ownership inscription, the volume has enjoyed an extraordinary provenance and has remained at the center of one of the longest-running controversies in Milton bibliography.

The attribution appears to originate with the Manchester bookseller William Ford, whose manuscript note on the front free endpaper asserts that "the whole of the ms. notes are entirely in the autograph of the celebrated Milton." Ford further claimed that comparison with surviving Milton manuscripts confirmed the handwriting and suggested that Browne's poem served as one of Milton's literary models, particularly for Paradise Regained. Ford also notes, "On comparison with some of his Mss. still existing I find such to be the case: and which has been discovered by some former proprietor, who has written in pencil at the top of page 2 of the work, 'All notes are written by Milton the Poet'". 

The case for authenticity was most fully advanced by Samuel Leigh Sotheby in Ramblings in the Elucidation of the Autograph of Milton (1861), where he devoted an entire chapter to the volume. Sotheby acknowledged contemporary skepticism, including suggestions that the annotations might be the work of a literary forger, but maintained that careful comparison with the Milton manuscripts at Trinity College demonstrated the identity of the hand. He further noted that distinguished nineteenth-century bibliophiles and booksellers—including William Pickering, Thomas Waller, and Joseph Lilly—accepted the attribution, a confidence reflected in the strong price realized when the volume appeared at auction.

William Carew Hazlitt likewise endorsed the attribution in his 1868 edition of Browne's works, tracing the book's reported descent from Milton's widow, Elizabeth Minshull Milton, through the Shrewsbury bookseller Joshua Eddowes to the Rev. Stedman before entering the great nineteenth-century private libraries. Arthur Henry Bullen later repeated the tradition in his Dictionary of National Biography entry on Browne, noting the copy preserved in the library of Alfred H. Huth and observing that experts had found no reason to doubt the authenticity of the annotations, although he regarded them as relatively slight in literary importance.

By the time of the celebrated Huth sale in 1911, however, auction cataloguers adopted more cautious language, describing the manuscript notes as "believed to be in the autograph of John Milton." The volume subsequently entered the library of Lucius Wilmerding, who reportedly required independent expert opinions before purchasing it from Charles Sawyer in 1920. According to the Wilmerding sale catalogue, both a manuscript specialist at the British Museum and the firm of Maggs Bros. accepted the attribution. When Parke-Bernet dispersed the Wilmerding library in 1950, the book was catalogued unequivocally as "John Milton's Copy."

Modern scholarship has taken a considerably more reserved view. The principal challenge came with John T. Shawcross's analysis in Huntington Library Quarterly (1962-63), which argued that orthographic and paleographical inconsistencies, particularly in spelling habits, were difficult to reconcile with Milton's authenticated manuscripts. William Riley Parker drew attention to Shawcross's conclusions in his landmark biography Milton: A Biography (1968), and subsequent Milton scholarship has generally regarded the attribution as unproven rather than established. While no definitive evidence has demonstrated that the annotations are a forgery, neither has a scholarly consensus emerged accepting them as unquestionably in Milton's hand.

REFERENCES:

Attributed manuscript annotations: Boswell 252; Columbia, XVIII, 336-340; Folger, Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700, MnJ 127; Hazlitt, pp.XX-XXV; Shawcross, "Milton's Spelling," Huntington Library Quarterly 1962-1963; Sotheby, Ramblings, pp.97-104 (and Plate XIV, No. 1).

The edition: Haywood 60; STC 3915.