Rare. ESTC records BL and Cambridge only in the UK; Rutgers in the US. An edition with parallel English and Italian text “By a friend of the author” was published the following year in Cambridge (BL, Bodley; Harvard, Ransom Center).
A moving elegy on the death of the author’s father, brother and sister in quick succession.
Brundish (d. 1786) was born in Norfolk, the son of Rev. John Brundish of Bury St. Edmunds, and educated at Caius College Cambridge before being ordained priest in Peterborough in 1780, he was master of the Perse School in Cambridge between 1781-2. ThIS deeply moving elegy was prompted ted by the death - in quick succession - of Brundish’s parent (apparently his father), a sister and his brother.
Brundish writes:
“Scarce had I wept a tender parent’s doom,
Scarce check’d the tear fond filial grief bestow’d,
Ere lost in earliest prime, relentless tomb,
A sister slept within thy dark abode“ (p.4)
The poem was re-printed in 1817 in the New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register where further biographical details are provided. The “bard” mentioned in the fourth stanza on p.6 is identified as Dr. Mountain [Jacob Mountain (1749-1825), fellow student of Brundish at Caius and later Bishop of Quebec] and “Eliza”, mentioned in the second stanza on p.7, as a “young lady in Norfolk, to whom Dr. B was engaged”.
The copy in the BL is inscribed to a “Miss Wale”. A drawing of Miss Wale by John Downman dated 1778 is in the British Museum with a note by the artist that Miss Wade “was a favourite of Mr Brandish of Caius College” and it may well be that Miss Wade was also the young lady to whom Brundish was engaged. There is also a drawing of Brundish and Jacob Mountain in the BM. It is quite likely that it was Mountain who translated this poem into Italian.
Provenance: George Pretyman Tomline (1750-1827), clergyman and Bishop of Lincoln and Winchester. Presentation copy inscribed in the upper fore-corner of the title-page: “Rev^d^ G. Pretyman / from the author”. Pretyman was
