A LETTER FROM A LADY TO HER HUSBAND ABROAD The fourth edition, corrected.

Folio, pp. [iv], 13; including the half title; disbound. Fourth edition: the first had appeared four months earlier, in September, 1728. This is the first printing to describe itself as 'corrected', but the text appears to be the same as that of previous editions, and Foxon suggests that this is at least in part a reimpression of the third anyway. The poem was based upon the break-up of the marriage between Margaret Hollings, the daughter of the London physician John Hollings, and Edward Walpole, the second son of Sir Robert Walpole; apparently the young man's father objected to the marriage, and forced his son to abandon his wife,and travel abroad, whence this lament in verse. Noel Broxholme (1686-1748), himself a physician, trained under Richard Mead after graduating from Christ Church, Oxford. William Stukeley, a fellow student with Broxholme at St. Thomas's Hospital, said that Broxholme 'was a man of wit and gayety, lov'd poetry, was a good classic got much money in the Misisipi project in France. At length he came over and practised, but never had a great liking to it, tho' he had good encouragement'. Horace Walpole once described him in a letter as follows: 'He was always nervous and vapoured, and so good-natured that he left off his practice from not being able to bear seeing so many melancholy objects. I remember him with as much wit as ever I knew'. Broxholme was adept at writing neo-Latin verse, and was part of the circle surrounding Anthony Alsop; for this aspect of his life see D.K. Money's The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the Tradition of British Latin Verse (1998). Broxholme committed suicide in 1748. Foxon B546. Of this edition, ESTC lists only five copies (CUL and Bodleian in the UK, and Illinois, Lilly and Texas in the USA). On the blank verso of the last leaf of this copy are some early pen trials, including a rather elaborate strip of lace, beneath which are the names 'Hollins' and 'Walpole': evidently the story behind this poem was common knowledge.…