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Anglistica & Americana
A Series of Reprints Selected by Bernhard Fabian, Edgar Mertner, Karl
Schneider and Marvin Spevack
1968
Theophilus Cibber
The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753)
Vol. I
1968
The present facsimile is reproduced from a copy in the possession ofthe Library of the University of Gottingen. Shelfmark: H. lit. biogr.I 8464.
Although the title-page of Volume I announces four volumes, the workis continued in a fifth volume of the same date. Like Volumes II, III,and IV, it is by "Mr. CIBBER, and other Hands" and is "Printed for R.GRIFFITHS".
GREAT BRITAIN and IRELAND,
To the TIME of
Compiled from ample Materials scattered in a Variety of Books, andespecially from the MS. Notes of the late ingenious Mr. COXETER andothers, collected for this Design,
By Mr. CIBBER.
In FOUR VOLUMES.
Contains the
Chaucer
Langland
Gower
Lydgate
Harding
Skelton
Barclay
More
Surry Earl
Wyat
Sackville
Churchyard
Heywood
Ferrars
Sidney
Marloe
Green
Spenser
Heywood
Lilly
Overbury
Marsten
Shakespear
Sylvester
Daniel
Harrington
Decker
Beaumont and Fletcher
Lodge
Davies
Goff
Greville L. Brooke
Day
Raleigh
Donne
Drayton
Corbet
Fairfax
Randolph
Chapman
Johnson
Carew
Wotton
Markham
T. Heywood
Cartwright
Sandys
Falkland
Suckling
Hausted
Drummond
Stirling Earl
Hall
Crashaw
Rowley
Nash
Ford
Middleton
* * * *
It has been observed that men of eminence in all ages, anddistinguished for the same excellence, have generally had something intheir lives similar to each other. The place of Homer's nativity, hasnot been more variously conjectured, or his parents more differentlyassigned than our author's. Leland, who lived nearest to Chaucer'stime of all those who have wrote his life, was commissioned by kingHenry VIII, to search all the libraries, and religious houses inEngland, when those archives were preserved, before their destructionwas produced by the reformation, or Polydore Virgil had consumed suchcurious pieces as would have contradicted his framed and fabuloushistory. He for some reasons believed Oxford or Berkshire to havegiven birth to this great man, but has not informed us what thosereasons were that induced him to believe so, and at p