[PW] Quotation (from Tottel's Miscellany?)

Silvia Benvenuto bradamanteml at gmail.com
Thu Nov 30 05:02:18 PST 2006


Dear list,

a friend is translating a novel from English to Italian and finds the
following quotation:

 "Did not the worms consume
 Her carrion to the dust?
 Did dreadful death forbear its fume
 For beauty, pride or lust?"

The author does not provide a bibliographic reference, but simply
writes: "Tottel asks of Helen in his Songs and Sonettes composed in
1557". We tried to locate this quotation in Tottel's Micellany, but we
only found the complete poem cited in an article of the "Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine" (found through Google Books; the title of the poem
is "On the Vanity of Man's Life", first line: "Vain is the fleeting
wealth"), reprinted in _The Museum of Foreign Literature, Science, and
Art_ edited by Robert Walsh, Eliakim Littell, J Jay Smith. According
to this article the poem is included in Tottel's Miscellany - but we
were unable to find it. Curiously enough, if we run a search for the
lines from a stanza (not the one cited in my friend's book, but the
previous one) in Google Books, among the results we find a 1870
edition of Tottel's Miscellany (but the text is not available). Can
anyone help us locate and identify this quotation?

Thanks in advance,

Silvia Benvenuto, Italy


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