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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE, TO HIS EDITION IN FOLIO, 1656. At my return lately into England, I met by great accident (for such I account it to be, that any copy of it should be extant any where so long, unless at his house who printed it, ) a book entituled The Iron Age, and published under my name, during the time of my absence. I wondered very much how one who could be so foolish to write so ill verses, should yet be so wise to set them forth as another man's rather than his own ; though perhaps he might have made a better choice, and not fathered the bastard upon such a person, whose stock of reputation is, I fear, little enough for maintenance of his own numerous legitimate off-spring of that kind. It would have been much less injurious, if it had pleased the author to put forth some of my writings under his own name, rather than his own under mine : he had been in that a more pardonable plagiary, and had done less wrong by robbery, than he does by such a bounty; for nobody can be justified by the imputation even of another's merit; and our own coarse clothes are like to become us better than those of another man, though never so rich: but these, to say the truth, were so beggarly, that I myself was ashamed to wear them. It was in vain for me, that I avoided censure by the concealment of my own writings, if my reputation could be thus executed in effigie; and impossible it is for any good name to be in safety, if the malice of witches have the power to consume and destroy it in an image of their own making. This indeed was so ill made, and so unlike, that I hope the charm took no effect. So that I esteem myself less prejudiced by it, than by that which has been done to me since, almost in the same kind; which is, the publication of some things of mine without my consent or k
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Prose works of Abraham Cowley ; including his essays in prose and verse
Book reviews » Prose works of Abraham Cowley ; including his essays in prose and verse
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