Of the literary industry of his more sedate and likeable elder brother, Edward, there is authentic evidence.

_A New World of Words, or a General Dictionary, containing the Terms, Etymologies, Definitions, and Perfect Interpretations, of the proper Significations of hard English words throughout the Arts and Sciences_: such is the title of a folio volume published by him in 1657, and for the purposes of which he was afterwards accused of having plagiarized largely from the _Glossographia_ of one Thomas Blount, published in the preceding year.

In this piece of labour, which was doubtless a bookseller's commission, he must have had, the question of plagiarism apart, his uncle's thorough good-will; but it cannot have been the same with his _Mysteries of Love and Eloquence: or the Arts of Wooing and Complimenting, as they are managed in the Spring Garden, Hide Park, the New Exchange, and other eminent Places_.

That performance, which appeared in August 1658, with a Preface "To the Youthful Gentry," and which must have been in progress at our present date, was much more in the vein of his brother John, and indeed was done to the order of Nathaniel Brooke, the bookseller who had published John's _Satyr against Hypocrites_, and also the more questionable _Sportive Wit or the Muses' Merriment_.

"The book," says Godwin, "is put together with conspicuous ingenuity and profligacy, and is entitled to no insignificant rank among the multifarious productions which were at that time issued from the press to debauch the manners of the nation and bring back the King.