The Lucasta Poems online

Tread (reader) gently, gently ore
The happy dust beneath this floor:
For in this narrow vault is set
An alablaster cabinet,
Wherein both arts and arms were put,
Like Homers Iliads in a nut,
Till Death with slow and easie pace
Snatcht the bright jewell from the case;
And now, transform'd, he doth arise
A constellation in the skies,
Teaching the blinded world the way,
Through night, to startle into day:
And shipwrackt shades, with steady hand,
He steers unto th' Elizian land.
Dudley Posthumus-Lovelace.



THE END.




Comments on the preparation of the E-Text:


ANGLE BRACKETS:

Any place where angle brackets are used, i.e. < >, it is
a change made during the preparation of this E-Text.
The original printed book did not use this character at all.

SQUARE BRACKETS:

The square brackets, i.e. [ ] are copied from the printed book,
without change.

FOOTNOTES:

For this E-Text version of the book, the footnotes have been
consolidated at the end of each section of the introduction,
and at the end of each poem.

Numbering of the footnotes has been changed, and each footnote
is given a unique identity in the form , where XX is
a poem or a section of the introduction, and YY is the number
of the note within that poem or section.

Some footnote markers are missing. I have inserted markers where
I believe they should go. All such markers are identified by
double brackets. e.g.

There were 5 footnotes in an "Additional Notes" section of the
book, and one footnote in the Table of Contents. These footnotes
have been identified as to and . They
have been moved to the end of the appropriate sections of the
E-Text, and footnote markers, identified by double angle brackets,
i.e. > have been added. The original locations of these
footnotes in the body text, however, are also indicated for
information.

LATIN AND GREEK POEMS:

This E-Text contains some poems in Latin and in Greek.

The Latin poems are reproduced as they appear in the book,
except that the accent marks have been deleted.

The Greek poems were originally typeset in Greek characters.
For this E-Text, the Greek characters have been TRANSLITERATED
into Roman characters, using a system developed for the
US Library of Congress, Ref.

ALA-LC ROMANIZATION TABLES
TRANSLITERATION SCHEMES FOR NON-ROMAN SCRIPTS
Approved by the Library of Congress and the American Library
Association
Tables compiled and edited by Randall K. Barry
Network Development and MARC Standards Office
Library of Congress, Washington, 1991

Again, it was necessary to delete the accent marks, this time
accents which were recommended to be placed over the roman
characters. The Greek poems are set off by angle brackets.

Single Greek words embedded in roman text have also been
transliterated, as described above, and are identified by
double angle brackets, e.g.

SPELLING:

I have made no spelling corrections whatsoever. In the poems,
the spelling is very inconsistent, with several different versions
of a word being used in different places

OTHER PROBLEMS WITH THE TEXT:

In a few places, the capital 'V' and 'I' characters were used
where we would use a capital 'U' of 'J' instead. These have not
been changed. For example, Vnlese, Iuvenal. Where the capitals
in the original text were used to highlight the first word of
a poem, 'V' was changed to 'v', for example, OVR became Ovr.

The copy of the book which I worked from had been re-bound on
several occasions. It is possible that the 'Table of Contents'
was originally placed after the introduction.

CHANGES TO THE TEXT:

Symbols for British currency are changed to , ,
and .

In several places the word 'the' appears with an accent mark over
the 'e'. The accent is in the form of a horizontal line above
the letter. This word has been rendered as ''. Similarly
'whe' with an accent over the 'e' is rendered as ''.