Unlocking the Mary Hamilton papers

Single Letter

HAM/1/20/62

Poem from Francis Napier, 8th Lord Napier, to Mary Hamilton

Diplomatic Text

[1]
[2]
Your Letter was welcome, and so were your Verses,
Fit poems for Princes, and eke for their Nurses,
The subject is clear, tho' You chuse to deny it,
Your closet's described, half an Eye can soon spy it.
                                                         N——.

(hover over blue text or annotations for clarification;
red text is normalised and/or unformatted in other panel)


Notes


 1. The date is uncertain, but the mention of princes and nurses suggests either Hamilton's period at Court or the euphoria of her release. It might well precede HAM/1/20/82 of 3 July 1783, where Napier asserts that ‘I would certainly have answered your Verse in Verse, could I have suffered myself to have been outSternholded’.
 2. These lines have been cut from a larger piece of paper, which seems to have originally held further text.

Normalised Text



Your Letter was welcome, and so were your Verses,
Fit poems for Princes, and eke for their Nurses,
The subject is clear, though You choose to deny it,
Your closet's described, half an Eye can soon spy it.
                                                         Napier

(consult diplomatic text or XML for annotations, deletions, clarifications, persons,
quotations, spellings, uncorrected forms, split words, abbreviations, formatting)



 1. The date is uncertain, but the mention of princes and nurses suggests either Hamilton's period at Court or the euphoria of her release. It might well precede HAM/1/20/82 of 3 July 1783, where Napier asserts that ‘I would certainly have answered your Verse in Verse, could I have suffered myself to have been outSternholded’.
 2. These lines have been cut from a larger piece of paper, which seems to have originally held further text.

Metadata

Library References

Repository: John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester

Archive: Mary Hamilton Papers

Item title: Poem from Francis Napier, 8th Lord Napier, to Mary Hamilton

Shelfmark: HAM/1/20/62

Correspondence Details

Sender: Francis Scott Napier, 8th Lord

Place sent: unknown

Addressee: Mary Hamilton

Place received: unknown

Date sent: between 1782 and ?1783
notBefore 1782 (precision: low)
notAfter 1783 (precision: low)

Letter Description

Summary: A poem by Francis Napier, 8th Lord Napier, thanking Mary Hamilton for her letter and verses.
   

Length: 1 sheet, 39 words

Transliteration Information

Editorial declaration: First edited in the project 'Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers' (Hannah Barker, Sophie Coulombeau, David Denison, Tino Oudesluijs, Cassandra Ulph, Christine Wallis & Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, 2019-2023).

All quotation marks are retained in the text and are represented by appropriate Unicode characters. Words split across two lines may have a hyphen on the first, the second or both fragments (reco-|ver, imperfect|-ly, satisfacti-|-on); or a double hyphen (pur=|port, dan|=ger, qua=|=litys); or none (respect|ing). Any point in abbreviations with superscripted letter(s) is placed last, regardless of relative left-right orientation in the original. Thus, Mrs. or Mrs may occur, but M.rs or Mr.s do not.

Acknowledgements: Transcription and XML version created as part of project 'Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers', funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council under grant AH/S007121/1.

Transliterator: Christine Wallis, editorial team (completed 21 September 2021)

Cataloguer: Lisa Crawley, Archivist, The John Rylands Library

Cataloguer: John Hodgson, Head of Special Collections, John Rylands Research Institute and Library

Copyright: Transcriptions, notes and TEI/XML © the editors

Revision date: 3 December 2021

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