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I first read Katherine Philips's poems in Minor Poets of the Caroline Period (3 vols, 1905–21), a modernist compendium issued by the Clarendon Press, edited by the indefatigable tory man of letters, George Saintsbury, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh from 1895 to 1915.¹ Philips appears in Volume 1 along with a trio of men now far more obscure than her: William Chamberlayne, Edward Benlowes and Patrick Hannay. Across the three volumes of Minor Poets, Saintsbury's aim is to provide a reliable text of largely unavailable and, in different degrees, forgotten poets, very lightly modernised and annotated, "for the student and lover of literature' (p. xvi). Most particularly, Saintsbury's anthology is designed for potential readers who do not have access to early modern books in major libraries and whose interest is centred on the poems rather than "the extreme collector's mania' for rare books (p. iv). Besides, he writes, copies of most of these poets are so hard to come by that they are "not to be obtained on the asking even at [] fancy prices' (p. iv).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137342430_7

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