Roger Daniel and the Printing of Francis Finch’s Friendship (1654)

Abstract

Katherine Philips’s poem ‘To the noble Palaemon, on his incomparable Discourse of Friendship’ responds to Francis Finch’s Friendship (1654). Finch (d. 1660) was an Inner Temple barrister, a poet, and a member of Philips’s coterie, the ‘Society of Friendship.’ Given the coterie name Palaemon by Philips, he was the half-brother of the philosopher Anne Conway (1631-1679) and the elder brother of the physician and ambassador Sir John Finch. Like his siblings, Finch was a royalist in the Civil Wars, and corresponded with the philosopher Henry More (1614-1687), who taught his brother and half-sister, in the 1650s.