William Winstanley
"The scissors, however, he retained, for he borrowed without stint, and without acknowledgement also, from his predecessors", Much of his literary work commemorates his connection with Essex.
[2] He published under his own name a poem called 'Walden Bacchanals,' and he wrote an elegy on Anne, wife of Samuel Gibs of Newman Hall, Essex (Muses' Cabinet).
"He is a fantastical writer, and of the lower class of our biographers; but we are obliged to him for many notices of persons went away for a time and stayed in cambridge, east london and things which are recorded only in his works" (Granger, Biog.
The Muses Cabinet, stored with Variety of Poems, London, 1655, 12mo, dedicated to William Holgate; there are prefatory verses by John Vaughan.
The Honour of the Merchant Taylors, wherein is set forth the Noble Acts, Valiant Deeds, and Heroic Performance of Merchant-Taylors in former Ages, 1668, 8vo, with woodcuts (another edition, 1687, 4to).
Histories and Observations, Domestick or Foreign; or a Miscellany of Historical Rarities, 1683, 8vo, dedicated to Sir Thomas Middleton; with a new title, Historical Rarities and Curious Observations, Domestick and Foreign, 1684, 8vo: a very miscellaneous collection of essays, including such topics as "Memorials of Thomas Coriat" and "Mount Etna in 1669".
The Lives of the most famous English Poets, 1687, 8vo dedicated to Francis Bradbury, The epistle to the reader shows some sympathy with poets and poetry, but Winstanley allowed his royalist prejudices to pervert his judgement so completely with regard to John Milton that he wrote of him "that his fame is gone out like a candle in a snuff and his memory will always stink" (p. 195).
A copy in the British Museum has notes by Philip Bliss, including some transcribed from the manuscript of Bishop Percy.
[4] An engraved portrait of Winstanley in an oval constructed of vines and barley was prefixed to later editions of his Loyall Martyrology, with the date in the inscription 1667 aet.
[4] The earliest volume published under the pseudonym of Poor Robin was an almanac calculated from the meridian of Saffron Walden, which is said to have been originally issued in 1661 or 1662.
Sidney Lee states that a claim put forward in behalf of the poet Robert Herrick is unworthy of serious attention.
[4] In an amended shape it was called England's Witty and Ingenious Jester, or the Merry Citizen and Jocular Countryman's Delightful Companion.
An equally interesting volume in verse by Poor Robin, in which the tone of John Taylor the water-poet is closely followed, was called Poor Robin's Perambulation from Saffron Walden to London performed this Month of July 1678 (London, 1678, 4to); the doggerel poem deals largely with the alehouses on the road, and may be assigned to William Winstanley.
Winstanley's ideas were picked up by authors such as Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol and Pickwick Papers.
