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Recently I recalled attention, in the pages of Studies in Bibliography (35 [1982], 297), to some minor pieces, gleaned from the Gentleman's Magazine, either previously unknown or buried in obscurity. Arthur Murphy's epitaph on John Ayton Thompson, I later discovered from a footnote in John Pike Emery's biography (1946), had appeared in Daniel Lyson's The Environs of London, 4 vols., 1795, II. 205. I had looked in the index to Emery's biography and failed to find an entry for Thompson, nor was there any headnote to the Index to alert readers to the fact that matter in footnotes was not indexed.[1] I came on the footnote while pursuing other game. Possibly one or more of the following bits and pieces in the European Magazine (hereafter EM) lurk in some obscure place; possibly some are known in their appearance elsewhere; some remain in manuscript. In this last category is Thomas Warton, the younger's, poem, "Ode On a New Plantation of flowering Shrubs in Trinity College Garden, at Oxford; the old Wilderness having been destroyed by the hard Frost 1740" (46.131-132), with a headnote, "The following Poem we have received from a friend. It is in the handwriting of its respectable Author, the late Poet Laureat, and is now printed for the first time." Thanks to the kindness of Dr. David Fairer of Leeds University I learn that the poem exists in manuscript "at Trinity College, Oxford, in the Warton MSS now on deposit in the Bodleian Library, and it was included by J. S. Cunningham in his unpublished B. Litt dissertation (Bodleian MS B.Litt d. 394-5) as poem 24." The EM version was unknown to both men.
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