This work aims to present a complete edition of Bishop Henry King's English poems.<br><br>The editio princeps of the poems, a modest and exceedingly rare little octavo, is dated 1657; but the unsold copies of that printing were re-issued in 1664 and again in 1700, with a new title-page upon each occasion, and to those copies bearing the earlier date were affixed thirty-eight additional pages of Elegies. After 1700 no edition appeared until 1843, when the Rev. J. Hannah republished more than half of King's poetry in an elaborately annotated form which has long been out of print.<br><br>The present edition includes the twenty-nine poems omitted by Hannah as well as the fifty selected by him, and in addition another considerable elegy that has not been reprinted since 1649; while four of King's hitherto uncollected poems or parts of poems are here for the first time printed, from various Mss., together with five other pieces whereof his authorship cannot be so definitely proved, but of which four are almost certainly his work.