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From A Miscellany containing Richard of Bury’s Philobiblon, The Basilikon Dōron of King James I., Monks and Giants by John Hookham Frere, The Cypress Crown by De La Motte Fouqué translated out of German into English by a Dutchman and The Library: A Poem by George Crabbe, with an Introduction by Henry Morley; George Routledge and Sons, London, 1888; p 7.

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Henry Morley’s Introduction to Monks and Giants

[From the pertinent part of the Introduction in The Miscellany by Henry Morley, on p. 7:]

“The next piece in the Miscellany is the playful mock heroic by John Hookham Frere, which in a later edition was entitled “Monks and Giants.” It is here printed directly from a copy of the first edition of 1817. Some account of Frere had been given in the Introduction to a volume of our Library which contained his translations from Aristophanes. The playful versification of this piece comes by lineal descent from Pulci’s “Morgante Maggiore” of the fifteenth century, and it has also an ancestor in Wieland’s “Oberon” of the eighteenth, but in Frere there was enlargement of its freedom, and it was own father to “Beppo” and “Don Juan.” Byron avowed that when he wrote “Beppo” he was imitating this poem of Frere’s, which has been for the last fifty years almost unknown to the great body of English readers.”






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