'To Fame Unknown': Familiar Verse Epistles of the Spring-Yelverton Coterie.

This article focuses on identifying Thomas Spring and Barry Yelverton as the authors of three previously unattributed poems written between 1758 and 1761, composed during their early law studies at the Middle Temple in London. It situates these works within a short-lived Irish literary coterie that exchanged poetry in manuscript form, emphasizing their ambivalence toward public literary fame as they prepared for legal careers. The article analyzes the poems’ thematic content, manuscript context, and print history—particularly their publication in Samuel Whyte’s 1772 anthology *The Shamrock*—highlighting how print editions obscured the authors’ identities and the coterie’s existence. Ultimately, it reveals the complex interplay between manuscript and print cultures in eighteenth-century Ireland and calls for further scholarly attention to these poets and their social-literary milieu.