For ’tis most certain winter woolsacks grow,
  Till that the sheepshorn planets give the hint,
  From geese to swans, if men could keep them so,
  And pickle pancakes in Geneva print.

At worst, the volume was but a catchpenny collection of pieces of a kind of which there was plenty already dispersed in print under the names of the same authors, or of others as classical; and, if this was the same book as the Sportive Wit, or at all like that book, it may have been some mere accident of the moment that brought Government censure upon Phillips’s volume, while others, as had, escaped.  But how annoying the whole occurrence to Milton![1]

[Footnote 1:  Thomason copy of Wit and Drollery in the British Museum, dated Jan. 18, 1655-6.—­I failed to find a book with the title The Sportive Wit in the Thomason Collection, and hence my hypothesis that there was but one book, with alternative titles.  I am rather inclined to believe, however, that there were two, and have a vague recollection of having seen two books, one with one of the titles and the other with the other, advertised in a contemporary newspaper list of books on sale by the publisher Brooke.  In Lowndes’s Bibliog.  Manual by Bohn, sub voce “Wit,” the two books are given as distinct; but then Sportive Wit or the Muses’ Merriment is there dated 1656, while there is no notice of an edition of Wit and Drollery, Jovial Poems, till 1661.  Though I leave the matter in doubt, some collector of Facetiac may know all about it.  In any case, if Wit and Drollery was not the identical book condemned, it is of interest to us as being one of Phillips’s editing at the same moment.—­Donne, who figures so strangely in Wit and Drollery, had been dead twenty-five years, but was accessible in various editions and reprints of his Poems.  The other three poets named in the title-page as the chief authors of the pieces—­Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and Davenant—­were still alive and publishing for themselves.  Indeed the Musarum Delitice, or Muses’ Recreation, consisting of pieces by Mennes and Smith, had been published by Herringman only the year before (1655), and was in its second edition in 1658; and it may have been the success of this and Smith in it.  Mennes, a stout book that led to Phillips’s publication and to the use of the names of Mennes Royalist sea-captain, who had served with Prince Rupert, and was in exile at our present date, became Chief Comptroller of the Navy after the Restoration and lived to 1670.  Smith was a Devonshire clergyman, of Royalist antecedents, who had complied with the existing powers and retained his living.  After the Restoration he had promotion in the Church:  and he died in 1667.]