Autograph Manuscript of the American actor and poet John Howard Payne, either an original poem or a translation, entitled 'Ode the Sixteenth. | The Herb Rue'.

2 pp, 4to. Text clear and complete. Fair, on lightly-aged paper, with slight wear to extremities. On one leaf, with both sides ruled with red borders. In Payne's neat and distinctive hand, and attributed to him in pencil at head. The poem is in ten four-line stanzas, with the first stanza reading: 'Hence may taint and blight betide ye | Lilly, rose and jessamine | Never more may nymph abide ye | Her fair dainty breast within.' Catchword at foot of first page, and with the ending of the poem on the second page followed by 'Ode the Seventeenth | La Colica Omitted', and the foot of the second page carrying the catchwords 'Ode the Eighteenth'. (The Voyager Press currently offers for sale with other material by Payne what is undoubtedly the manuscript of that eighteenth ode, identified from a photograph on the firm's website, describing it as 'An unpublished manuscript poem titled "The Sexes of the Flowers according to the System of Linnaeus"'.)