Egerton MS 3879

Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke: The Psalms of David translated into English verse; circa 1584-1599. Copy, circa but before 23 April 1632. Psalms 1-43 had been translated in the 1580s by Sidney (d. 1586), possibly in collaboration with his sister Mary (d. 1621), 3^rd wife of Henry Herbert, 2^nd Earl of Pembroke, who continued the work up to Psalm 150 by circa 1599. The complete text was first printed in 1823 by Samuel Weller Singer in an edition based on the Penshurst manuscript which was transcribed by John Davies of Hereford (d. 1618). The present manuscript is not one of the seventeen described and collated in The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, ed. by Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon and Michael G. Brennan, Oxford, 1998, vol. II, The Psalmes of David, and it incorporates readings not found in any of them. For an account of the provenance, etc., of the manuscript and its place in the stemma see Gavin Alexander, ‘A New Manuscript of the Sidney Psalms: A Preliminary Report’, Sidney Journal, vol. 18, no. 1 (2000), pp. 43-56. Purchased at Christie’s, 12 July 2000, lot 312.

Paper: ff. iv+186. 145 mm x 190 mm. Early 20^th cent. binding of blue morocco, gilt-stamped with double compartment on each cover and between the five raised bands on the spine which is lettered ‘sidney.│psalms│ms.’; top foredge of leaves gilt. Binder’s stamp on verso of front flyleaf (f. ii verso) reads ‘bound by stoakley. late hawes’. Pages ruled in red ink after gathering and transcription, with compartments for text, psalm-incipits and numbers (now faded), and stanza-dividers. Running titles also in red, and scribal colophon (f. 182) ‘Haec meminisse juvat Apr 23 1632’, modifying Virgil, Aeneid, I, 203. Catchwords almost invariable. Copied, apparently not by a professional scribe, in a neat but variable mixed hand, except for Psalms 121-126 (ff. 160v-163v) which, without apparent change of ink, are in Secretary script. Besides numerous corrections of his own mistranscriptions, executed by the copyist both currente calamo and retrospectively, occasional variant readings are noted in the margins (ff. 68v, 128, 153), signalled by ‘al.’. Others (e.g. ff. 4, 8, 23v, 25 and 135), added in black ink and a contemporary hand apparently at the same time as the verse-numbering in Psalms 1 to 16 (ff. 4-25), may represent an attempt to improve on the original. The version of octave G of Psalm 119 occupying the opening between the present ff. 151 and 152 was deleted by glueing the pages together [LIFT]; the admonition ‘do not open these 2 leaves’ (f. 151) occurs in the later hand and greyish ink also used for observations on the metres, etc., on ff. 31 and 141v. Verses numbered in black ink by a contemporary hand to correspond with those of the biblical text as far as Ps. 16, v.14 (ff. 4-25), with variant readings noted above. Ink pagination (odd numbers only) from 1 to 355 and sporadic psalm-numbering from 55 to148 passim in an 18^th-century hand may be coeval with name or signature of ‘James [?Bate]’ scribbled several times in a childish script on f. 29. Early 19^th-cent. inscription ‘Psalms of David in verse by Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke’ on f. 1. Various bibliographical references datable to after 1808 listed in pencil at end of volume (f. 183). Owned, 1820-1879, by the Rev. Henry Cotton (signature, 1820, on f. 4; ‘Collated and perfect. H.C.’ on f. 3v); before 1936 by the music critic John Alexander Fuller-Maitland (pictorial bookplate, incorporating arms, on f. i); before 1941 by Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole (pencilled note on f. ii verso ‘From Sr Hugh Walpole Library July/45’, with printed extract from Christie’s sale-cat. of 2 July 1945, lot ???, at f. iii); and thereafter by William Alfred Westropp Foyle (red leather and gilt bookplate of Beeleigh Abbey pasted on to f. ii) in the sale-cat. of whose collection, part III, Christie’s, 12 July 2000, lot 312, it is described.