COLLINS (Mortimer). Idyls and Rhymes.1845

Dublin: J. MC Clashan; W. S. Orr and Company, London; Stephen Barbet, Jun., Guernsey, First edition, 96 pp., original pink embossed cloth, spine slightly faded, lettered in gilt on upper cover, uncut and partly unopened, a very nice copy. The author's first book. Collins, novelist and poet, was the son of a solicitor at Plymouth, and was for a time a teacher of mathematics at Queen Elizabeth's College in Guernsey. "Idyls and Rhymes", his first book was written while he was living in Guernsey, and includes poems on Wordsworth, the Daffodil, the Duke of Wellington and Hartley Coleridge. He settled in Berkshire and adopted a literary life, and was a prolific author, writing largely for periodicals. He also wrote a good deal of occasional and humorous verse, and several novels, including Sweet Anne Page (1868), Two Plunges for a Pearl (1872), Mr. Carrington (1873), under the name of "R.T. Cotton," and A Fight with Fortune (1876).