The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language.: Arranged with notes.

Cambridge: Macmillan and Co.,, 1861. First edition, first impression, of the most popular of all poetry anthologies, widely reprinted into modern times, and which did much to establish an accepted canon of the "best" poems in English literature. Three impressions, deceptively similar, were published - this first impression is distinguished by the relevant points established by Foxon, with a Roman type half-title and the price of "4/6" on the spine (changed to Gothic type and the price removed for second and later impressions). The first impression was published in July 1861; based on Palgrave's notes in his own copies, the second impression was published in October, and the third in November. Dedicated to his friend Alfred Tennyson, with whom he had broached the idea of a different kind of anthology during a walking tour of Cornwall in 1860, Palgrave's Golden Treasury gathered what he considered the greatest and best-known English poetry from the 16th century down to the Romantics. "It remains one of those rare instances in which a critical work has substantive imaginative value, and entitles its author to rank among creative artists" (DNB). The title page vignette is after the sculptor Thomas Woolner, a friend of Tennyson's, who shared a house with Palgrave in the early 1860s; it appears to be a self-portrait in the guise of a Pan-like figure fluting beneath a sapling and was engraved exquisitely by C. H. Jeens, whose work for Macmillan "earned him notice as one of the miniaturists of engravers, and in some ways a follower of Bartolozzi" (ODNB). Octavo. Original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, vignette within double rule frame to front cover in gilt, frame stamped in blind to rear cover, brown endpapers, edges untrimmed. Title page vignette after Thomas Woolner with tissue-guard. Contemporary bookseller's ticket to front pastedown and binder's ticket to rear. Minimal rubbing at peripheries, a bright, fresh copy, contents clean. David Foxon, "Bibliographical Notes and Queries", The Book Collector, autumn 1955, pp. 252-3, & spring 1956, p. 75.