8vo (198 x 125mm. ) viii, 335 pp. Lightly browned. Contemporary calf (neatly re-backed in a slightly lighter calf, preserving original label), corners bumped, boards slightly rubbed.
London: [William Bowyer] for the Author, and sold by R. Manby, and H. S. Cox, 1745.
Whaley (1710-45) was King's Scholar (1724) at Eton and then at King's College, Cambridge, of which he was A Fellow 1731-45. There he was tutor to Horace Walpole, to whom the book is dedicated (HW's copy is in the V & A). HW was later to reprint in Aedes Walpolianae his poem 'A journey to Houghton' (here pp. 29-51) which describes the pictures there (identified in the footnotes). There are a number of translations and adaptations from Theocritus and Tibullus as well as from later poets such as Sannazaro, Marullus, and Johannes Secundus.
Foxon, p. 888. A prospectus was issued on 1 March 1745 (copy in BL) with copies to be available in June at 5 shillings and an edition of 750 copies was entered to Manby in Bowyer's ledgers. This is a different collection from Whaley's Collection of Poems, 1732, though it also contains poems identified Walpole in his copy as by the Rev. Sneyd Davies and Lord Lyttelton and others (about two-fifths of the poems are by others).
