Oriental Eclogues: Written Originally for the Entertainment of the Ladies of Tauris. And Now Translated

London: J. Payne, 1757. First thus, second edition of Persian Eclogues. 8vo. [iii]-vii, 23, [1, ads] pp., lacking half-title. 2(— 1, half-title) A-G2. Removed from pamphlet volume (numbered "6" in ink at head of title) and bound in later blue wrappers, light soiling to E2v and F1r The second edition of Collins's first published work, Persian Eclogues (1742), with new title and revisions to the text. The preface outlines the conceit of the work, that the poems originated in the Middle East, written ca. 1700 by one Abdullah, a Persian from Tauris, and passed from a silk and carpet merchant to the unnamed English translator. The four eclogues follow in succession the passage of the day from morning to midnight, and though retaining many elements of form and language of contemporary English poetry, attempt to capture an “Oriental” mode of thought. "There is an elegancy and wildness of thought which recommends all their [i.e. Arabian or Persian] compositions; and our [i.e. English] genius's are as much too cold for the entertainment of such sentiments, as our climate is for their fruits and spices" (Preface, p. vi). This framing gives Collins cover for “more extravagant imagery” (Lonsdale, p. 368) and an escape from the “inhibiting rationality and omnipresent social tone of much Augustan poetry” (ibid, p. 368). Collins later disputed his success in the project, as noted by Johnson in his Life of Collins, "In his maturer years he was accustomed to speak very contemptuously of them, calling them his Irish Eclogues, and saying they had not in them one spark of Orientalism." Lonsdale sums up the achievement of the Eclogues as “the extension of the subject matter of the pastoral by the introduction of exotic elements in to English poetry” (p. 368) and credits this 1757 edition as marking Collins's "gradual emergence, as a poet if not a man, from the obscurity of his last unhappy years" (p. 367).Joseph Warton claims the Eclogues were written when Collins was about seventeen years old, a student at Winchester School, and were inspired by the poet's reading the chapters on Persia on Thomas Salmon's Modern History of All Nations. They were published, probably with some revision, in 1742 as Persian Eclogues when Collins was at Oxford. The intervening years between the first publication in 1742 and this second edition in 1757, included the publication of Collins's influential but largely ignored Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects in 1746 and the onset of a debilitating mental illness. "Joseph Warton reported that Collins was 'greatly mortified' that the Eclogues 'found more readers and admirers than his Odes' (Works of Alexander Pope, 1.115)—and the retitled Oriental Eclogues were published in 1757, perhaps under the supervision of Warton" (ODNB). As summarized by Lonsdale, the revised 1757 edition contains autograph changes made by Collins in a copy of the 1742 edition, as well as several changes, including the addition of a couplet, which do not appear in that copy. "If, as seems likely, Joseph Warton superintended the 1757 edition, he may well have made these well-meaning 'improvements' himself, on behalf of his friend who was now thought to be insane" (Lonsdale, p. 367). Oriental Eclogues would be Collins's final publication, the work in its two versions bookending his adult life and career.REFERENCE: ESTC T43416; Lonsdale (ed), The poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith (1969); Rothschild 654; Williams, p. 112