¶ESTC R218862, BL only in UK; Huntington, Folger & Yale only in North America. ESTC attributes the opening verse to Thomas Barkworth ('identified by Cty'). However, Anthony A. Wood notes that this cypher ('Once I was alive...') belonged to Thomas Baskerville, known as the 'King of Jerusalem' (Athenæ Oxonienses, 1848, pp 86-7.) He refers directly to this print, which he surmises was published in 1699: 'The portrait of Baskerville is supposed by Noble to have been engraved by Vertue, but by the execution this is hardly probable. He is represented in an oval, with a slouch-hat, over a large flowing wig, a neck-kerchief hanging long and loosely, and having his hands clasped together, a singular and miserable looking personage'. Wood quotes a passage from the diaries of Thomas Hearne, the antiquary and keeper of books at the Bodleian Library, explaining the history of the portrait: 'Baskerville 'was so whimsical a man as to call himself by the said title of the King of Jerusalem, and would ramble about all the country and pick up all strange odd things, good and bad, which he had written fair in two large folios, which he design'd to have printed, and for that end had his picture engrav'd which was to have been prefix'd as a frontispiece'. Baskerville died before the work could be published and one of the volumes found its way into the Harleian Collection. Thomas Baskerville, 1629-1705, is described in Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, 1883, as an 'eccentric squire of Bayworth' a village in the parish of Sunningwell of which he was the Lord of the Manor. Baskerville's father had studied at Oxford, a few miles from Sunningwell, and although Thomas did not follow in his footsteps, he wrote an account of the town describing Oxford in the period after the Restoration (Evans, The University of Oxford: a new history). Baskverville 'was a collector of manuscripts and in the year 1678 had books and manuscripts which were in Hearne's opinion of very good value and great curiosity'. Indeed, Hearne had wanted to acquire Baskerville's books after his death but failed to do so. DNB erroneously notes that he died on February 9, 1720, this in fact, the date of his son's death. In James Caulfield's Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters of Remarkable Persons... Baskerville's death is recorded as being 'about the year 1705'. The 1819 edition of this work includes an engraving by George Cruikshank of the portrait illustrated here together with a brief biography of John Baskerville. 'He was well known to the Oxford Students, who, from his dry, droll, and formal appearance, gave him the nickname of the King of Jerusalem, he being of a religious turn, and constantly speaking of that heavenly city; a pretention to inherit which, he founded on what he styled his regeneration or second birth, in the year 1666, as may be gathered from his own poetic lines, inserted under his portrait': 'As shadows fly, So hours dye And dayes do span the age of man In month of AUGUST twenty nine I first bean my mourning time Thousand Six hundred ninety nine I number yeares then sixty nine Yet I drudge on as said before, Ther's Time, ichen Time shall be no more. A second Birth I had I say January Eleventh day In that circle Fifty-two Weeks Thousand Six hundred Sixty-six A ray of Light I saw that day Enter my heart with heat and joy Saying these words unto me then King of Jerusalem'.