[Georgiana, Countess Spencer, mother of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire] Copy in her Fair Hand of the Ode by Mr Mason [Adapted] [William Mason, poet, divine, correspondent of Walpole, Gray etc.]

Entitled Hope - to the Dutchess of Devonshire (an Ode to her daughter adapted from Mason's Ode 13 or vice versa - see Note below.). Four pages, 4to, aged but clear and complete, fold mark, right edge uneven and glue remnant, from album of commonplace book presumably. Text begins: What magic warblings to my Ear and concludes 39 lines later (if I've counted correctly) [itself in quotation marks] Nor will I quit thee at the grave. Another hand, suspiciously resembling Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire's roughest hand, has added the words on reading his Ode to Hope, and adds to the end of the poem, This ode is in the hand writing of Georgiana, Daugh[te]r of the Rt Hon[ora]ble Stephen Poyntz, married to John first Earl Spencer, & mother of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. Georgiana Spencer became the Duchess of Devonshire upon marriage in 1774, presumably. See Images (very readable). I found one reference to (the first line) of this Ode Hope-to the Dutchess of Devonshire via Googlebooks which recognised the first line What Magic in the Beinecke Library's Volume of first lines, but now Googlebooks is denying that vision! BUT the Second verse of Mason's Ode XIII runs as follows: What tender warblings to my ear, | On Zephyr's borne, aspire, | To draw me from my sapphire sphere, | Charmed by her magic lyre? | I come; she wakes the willing strings, | With careless grace her hand she flings | The soft symphonious chords among; | Nor ever on the listening plain, | Since the sweet Lesbian tuned her strain. (full text, no. of stanzas, in The British Poets including Translations, [Vol.] LXXVI Mason, vol.1, [Chiswick 1822], pp.61-64. The earliest publication of this Ode pace Googlebooks seems to be 1811. I have yet to find an earlier publication date, begging the question whether Mason wrote/published the version in British Poets before or after the tribute to Georgiana in which she is named. But Ode XIII could well be a tribute to her, without naming. And perhaps Mason circulated a MS of the Poem before publication (long before?).