No other London imprint is to be found there or in the larger libraries
of England. Of the three other copies located, that sold at audion (the
White Kennett copy) and that in the Massachusetts Historical Society
came direct from England, and the actual provenance of the copy in the
New York Historical Society is not known. It belonged to Rufus King,
long United States minister near the court of St James's, and is bound
with other tracts under a general title of "Topographical Collection,
Vol. I." The binding, Mr. Kelby tells me, is American. There is no mark
to show when or where King obtained the pamphlet, and the Society
did not receive it until 1906. That Rufus King belongs as much to
Massachusetts as to New York is too slight a foundation on which to
erect a claim that this particular tract was of Massachusetts origin.
In no case, therefore, can an American setting to any one of the four
known copies of the S. G. "Isle of Pines" be [22]established.{1} The
probabilities are all against Samuel Green. The incident is a good
example of the danger of giving play to the imagination on an appearance
of a combination of fads cemented by interest.
Thus disappears from our memory the certain identification of the S. G.
pamphlet as an early issue of the press in Cambridge, and with it goes
my identification of the Johnson pamphlet with the S. G. title-page--a
veritable pipe dream. It might be urged that as White Kennett was
collecting on America, it would be more than probable that he would
have had an American issue; but his own catalogue of 1713 describes the
nine-page tract, and that is our London edition. I might claim still
that my Johnson was a Johnson, with a London title-page; but the
typographical adornment on the first page of its text is just the same
as the adornment on the first page of the London issue--three rows
of fleur-de-lys, thirty-seven in each row, and the same kind of type
characters.{2}
1 Lowndes indexes it under George Pine, and describes a
nine-page trait--probably the one now in the British Museum.
He quotes a sale of a copy in it 60 (Puttkk) for £4.10s. He
indexes the combined parts under Sloetten, and notes a copy,
with the plate, sold in the White Knights sale for 1s..
2 To attempt to reason from types or rule of thumb
measurements, however suggestive, leads to indefinite
conclusions. For example, the width of the type page of the
S. G. issue of the first part is exactly that of the English
issue of the second part, but the former has 33 tines to the
page and the latter a a. The width of the page in the
variant S. G. issue is narrower and there are 38 and 39
lines to the page. But in the London second part the width
of page varies by a quarter of an inch. We have Marmaduke
Johnson's issue of Paine's Daily Meditations y issued in
1670 in connection with S. G. The ornamental border of
fleur-de-lys is entirely different from those in the S. G.
Isle of Pines. A copy of Johnson's issue of Scottow's
translation of Bretz on the Anabaptists, printed in 1668,
the very year of the Isle of Pines, shows a different foot
of italics from that used in the Isle of Pines variant,
yet the roman characters in the two pieces seem identical,
and the width of page is exactly the same.
So I bid farewell to my theory, [23]and can only congratulate myself on
having cleared one point--the London issue--and on having introduced
a new confusion by the discovery of a second London issue with an
identical title-page, a problem for the future to solve. I much doubt if
a true Johnson issue will ever be found, for I believe the action of the
authorities prevented its birth.
In the library of Mr. Henry E. Huntington is a London issue of which
I do not find another example. It contains sixteen pages, and the
title-page gives neither printer's name nor place of publication. It may
be the first issue, or it may be a later re-issue of the tract, for the
type, especially the italic, is better than that in the S. G. issue.
The punctuation also is more carefully looked after, and the whole
appearance suggests an eighteenth century print. As the original was
duly licensed, there was no reason to suppress the names of printer or
booksellers. Nor could the contents of the piece call out controversy
or hostility from any political faction or religious following. It
was proper for the author to omit his name from the publication, if he
desired to remain unknown; but the publisher, having the support of the
licenser, had every reason to advertise his connexion with the tract,
although he could not have anticipated so ready an acceptance by the
public. While I place the Huntington pamphlet first in the bibliography,
I am more inclined to regard it as a publication made at a later time.
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