12mo. [12], 162pp, [2]. With a list of subscriber's. Contemporary gilt-tooled calf, contrasting red morocco lettering-piece. Rubbed, lower joint starting, corners bumped. Marbled endpapers, recent book-label of J. O. Edwards to FEP, early inked ownership inscription 'Wm. Armroid his Book' to verso of FFEP, scattered spotting.

The sole edition of poet, dramatist, and literary editor William Woty's (bap. 1732, d. 1791) second published collection of verse.

The lengthy list of subscriber's, containing numerous residents of Woty's native Hampshire, include actor and playwright David Garrick (1717-1779). Woty evidently had a keen interest in the London theatre. His first published work, The Shrubs of Parnassus (1760), contains two prologues written for performances at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, and one written for the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Garrick, alongside Samuel Johnson and Tobias Smollett, subscribed. The Blossoms of Helicon meanwhile includes 'Mr. Garrick in the Shades. A Vision', an eleven-stanza ballad relating a woeful dream envisioning the death of the celebrated actor and his passing into the afterlife with spirit of Shakespeare as his guide:

'With pen in hand, dropt from an Angels wing,
The Bard he found, beneath a laurel shade;
Then, kneeling to the comprehensive seer,
The truest marks of adoration paid.'

Woty later published The Stage: a Poetical Epistle to a Friend (1780) and two short dramatic pieces: The Country Gentlemen, or, The Choice Spirits (1786) and The Ambitious Widow: a Comic Entertainment (1789).

ESTC records copies at just eight locations (BL, Folger, Harvard, Huntington, Illinois, LoC, Oxford, and V&A).