Thomas Rymer
[3] Although Rymer was still at Cambridge in 1662 when he contributed Latin verses to a university volume to mark the marriage of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza, there is no record of his taking a degree.
[4] Under a royal warrant of 1693 and working with original documents dating back to the 12th century, many held in the Tower of London, for the rest of his life he collated and published Foedera (lit.
[4] Rymer's first appearance in print[b] was as translator of René Rapin's Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie (1674),[8] to which he added a preface in defence of the classic rules for unity in drama.
[9] Rymer's views on drama were again given to the world in a printed letter to Fleetwood Shepheard, a friend of Matthew Prior, entitled The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider'd (1678).
[10] Here, in discussing Rollo Duke of Normandy by John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Ben Jonson, and George Chapman, Rymer coined the term "poetical justice".
[13] Rymer wrote a preface to Whitelocke's Memorials of English Affairs (1682),[14] and in 1681 A General Draught and Prospect of the Government of Europe, reprinted in 1689 and 1714 as Of the Antiquity, Power, and Decay of Parliaments,[15] where ignorant of a future dignity that would be his, he had the misfortune to observe, "You are not to expect truth from an historiographer royal.
[4][i] Rymer's next piece of authorship was to translate the sixth elegy of the third book of Ovid's Tristia for Dryden's Poetical Miscellanies.
), a collection of "all the leagues, treaties, alliances, capitulations, and confederacies, which have at any time been made between the Crown of England and any other kingdoms, princes and states.
Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy's later Syllabus (1869-1885) provided summaries in English,[36][37] despite the multiple incorrect assertions of certain websites.
He was assisted by Robert Sanderson, who completed and published by 1717 the material of Rymer's two unfinished volumes covering the period up to 1625 (death of James I), including an index to the whole work of which it was written, "nothing can well be more inconvenient".
George Holmes, clerk to Sir William Petyt, Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London revised the first 17 volumes in a 2nd edition (pub.
1–17 by Jean Le Clerc and Paul de Rapin, which had appeared soon after the English publication of each successive volume, with a new index to this edition of the Foedera.
A three-volume English-language summary and index (Syllabus) to the 1st, 3rd and 4th editions of Foedera was published by Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy in 1869–1885.
[49] In the introduction to his second volume, Hardy was highly critical of Clarke who, although an industrious biblical and oriental scholar, was utterly unskilled in diplomacy or palaeography, and lacking any profound acquaintance with the English historical and antiquarian literature.
[51] He spends ten whole pages berating the editors of the Record edition for both what they included and what they omitted, especially for copying from printed sources and not consulting original MS, even though they were easily available and to hand.
[53] The Gentleman's Magazine of July 1834 also notes that although Clarke was a distinguished orientalist himself, the sole entry in Arabic in the 4th edition has a mistake.
Hardy had intended in his Syllabus to correct not only all the errors in Clarke, but in the whole of the first three editions as well: but this proved to be beyond him, faced with a vast array of material.
