Poetry Codex

Restoration & Augustan

Edward Jerningham

1737?–1812

Edward Jerningham (1737?–1812) was a poet and dramatist born into the Catholic Jerningham family of Costessey (Cossey) Hall, Norfolk, and was educated on the Continent. He moved in fashionable London literary and theatrical society, and wrote sentimental narrative poems, elegies, album verses and a few stage pieces; the plays are not included here.

His chief successes were the pathetic verse tales and occasional poems of the 1760s to the 1790s, among them Il Latte, The Deserter, Yarico to Inkle, The Nun, Faldoni and Teresa (1773) and The Fall of Mexico (1775), and the longer poems The Shakspeare Gallery, Enthusiasm and Abelard to Eloisa. This selection follows his collected Poems of 1796 (a new edition, in two volumes, from the ECCO-TCP transcription), together with the separately published pieces from 1773 to 1796 that the collection did not reprint.

Poems (57)

  1. The Magdalens; A Poem
  2. Yarico to Inkle
  3. The Nun; or, Adaleida to Her Friend
  4. The Nunnery
  5. The Deserter
  6. Il Latte
  7. Matilda
  8. The Swedish Curate, A Poem
  9. The Funeral of Arabert, Monk of La Trappe, A Poem
  10. Written in Mr. Hume's History
  11. Imitated from the French
  12. For the Vase at Bath Easton: Upon Dreams (November, 1777)
  13. For the Vase at Bath Easton: Dissipation
  14. The Indian Chief
  15. Inscription for a Reed-House
  16. The Venetian Marriage
  17. The Mexican Friends
  18. Guatimozino's Speech, at the Place of Interment
  19. The Speech of the High-Priest, at the Pile
  20. Whence is that veering spirit of the sky
  21. The Ancient English Wake; A Poem
  22. Inscription Intended for an Old Thatched Church
  23. On the Death of Two Favourite Birds
  24. Sensibility
  25. The Soldier's Farewell, on the Eve of a Battle
  26. Albina
  27. To the Late Earl of Chesterfield
  28. On the Death of Mr. Garrick, 1779
  29. On the Author of the Ballad Called the Children in the Wood
  30. To Lady Catharine Murray, During Her Recovery from an Illness, Occasioned by Her Cloaths Catching Fire, 1781
  31. To a Lady, Who Lamented She Could Not Sing
  32. A Sonnet to the Book
  33. February 4th, 1785
  34. Honoria: or, the Day of All Souls. A Poem
  35. The Shakspeare Gallery
  36. Lines on Sir Joshua Reynolds Resigning the Presidency of the Royal Academy
  37. On Miss Jerningham. January 1773
  38. On James Robson, Who Died in the Twentieth Year of His Age, by a Fall from His Horse
  39. On Miss Hamilton
  40. Lines on Sir John Elliot, M.D.
  41. Lines for a Monument of Two Friends
  42. The Rise and Fall of the Northern Poetry: A Poem, in Two Parts
  43. Abelard to Eloisa: A Poem
  44. The African Boy
  45. Enthusiasm: A Poem, in Two Parts
  46. An Apologue
  47. The Rookery
  48. Tintern Abbey
  49. To the Baron Nolcken, the Swedish Ambassador, on His Sudden Recall
  50. To the Right Honourable Lady Hervey
  51. To the Memory of the Late Lady Jerningham
  52. Faldoni and Teresa
  53. The Fall of Mexico
  54. On Seeing Mrs. Montagu's Picture
  55. The Oak
  56. May the 9th, 1779, Miss Boyle's Birth Day
  57. Peace, Ignominy, and Destruction

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