AN EPISTLE FROM CALISTA TO ALTAMONT The second edition.

Folio, pp. 8; title and last leaf a little stained at lower edge; disbound. Second edition: first printed earlier the same year. This is one of a number of poems published at about this time on the scandalous love life of Lady Abergavenny. The second half of the poem is devoted to demonstrating that such affairs were common among the upper classes: 'But are these all the guilty Truths are known? Is it enough I instance These alone?' Calista's own career was brought to an end by her death a few months after these lines were published; as Foxon notes, the poem was reprinted the following year in an account of the trial of her last lover, Richard Lyddel (or Liddell), who was convicted of 'crim. con.' The authorship of this poem is revealed in Thomas Whincop's Scanderbeg (1747), which contains, besides the play, a substantial and quite useful useful 'list of all the dramatic authors, with some account of their lives'. Charles Beckingham (1699-1731) began his literary career at the age of 19 with a full-dress tragedy called Scipio Africanus; when it was acted at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, with James Quin in the title role, his schoolfellows at the Merchant Taylors' School were given the day off to attend the first performance and give it a boisterous reception. Beckingham did not go on to university, but drifted into Grub Street, where he was employed by Edmund Curll. There is a brief but amusingly dismissive account of his later career in the original DNB, though the writer of that entry did not know of this poem, nor one on another scandal called Sarah the Quaker, published the same year. The more recent entry in the Oxford DNB ends on a similar note: 'He did not merit a place in Pope's Dunciad, though James Thomson mentions him in a list of obvious dunces.' Foxon B136. Beckingham's poems are all very uncommon: of this one the ESTC lists nine copies of the first edition, and only three of this reprint (Rylands in the UK, and Case Western and Duke Universities in the US), with Foxon adding another in Canberra.…