Mystagogus Poeticus

Mystagogus Poeticus grew, as we have noted, out of Mel Helconium, which was written over a period of several months or more and was published at about the time that Ross was obliged to leave Southampton. ¹ That he should think of expanding the earlier work was entirely natural. He was a relative newcomer to London in 1645-1646, probably struggling to earn a living from his teaching and his writing. Mel Heliconium was, strictly speaking, incomplete (its title page describes it as "The first Book"), and Ross, who may have used it in his own boarding school, very likely realized that there was a promising market among the London public at large as well as among schoolboys for an English language dictionary of mythology. He may have possessed notes collected over the years or even a quantity of completed material which could go into the larger work. For a scholar like him, the process of enlargement was easy. He simply discarded the verse "meditations," augmented each of the existing entries in Mel Heliconium with a few lines of interpretation, and added fifty-one new entries to fill out the alphabet from H (Hebe) to V (Vulcan). ² These changes, plus a new title, dedicatory epistle (to Sir Edward Bannister, an old Hampshire acquaintance), and an index, went to make up the book which would be expanded again for its second edition (1648) and reprinted for a total of six editions during the next three decades. The 1647 edition, however, amounts to more than just a larger version of Mel Heliconium. In discarding the poems, Ross transformed the book from a pleasant little collection of trifles 136into a work with undoubted scholarly pretensions. As the only full-length myth dictionary available in English and the only mythography which was arranged in alphabetical order, Mystagogus became the most complete and convenient compilation of myth lore in England. From its first publication in 1647 until the 1670s, when D'Assigny entered the market with his Poetical Histories, Mystagogus was first in English interpretative mythography, there being no serious contender for second.