ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online) is an online database published by the Gale Group, and available to all faculty and students at the University of Western Ontario (as well as to those belonging to other institutions subscribing to this service). It permits access to a wide variety of printed books, pamphlets, and broadsides published between 1701 and 1800, and is fully searchable. Works accessed through this source are viewed as facsimile text images (in .png format), and can additionally be viewed and printed in PDF format (on Adobe Acrobat).

ECCO can be accessed through the Western Libraries site, under "Research Resources," through the Shared Library online catalogue, or directly through this link:

http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO?locID=lond95336

Note that entrance into this database is restricted to those working from a computer on the UWO network, or using a EZProxy, or a proxy server.

From within ECCO, users can search for titles, authors, and also within texts for keywords using both simple and "advanced" search options.

To access the 1702 edition of Edward Bysshe's The Art of English Poetry, you can click here.

Alternately, choose "Advanced Search" from the options that appear near the top of the initial ECCO screen:

Next, scroll down to the empty text field box labelled "Or, Search by Gale Document Number."

In the empty text field box, entered the following number: "CW116738363"; this is the unique identifier for Bysshe's work in the ECCO database. Click on the "Search" button beneath the text field box. This will take you to the full bibliographical citation for the work. You should save this information, as you will need it to provide a bibliographical citation to the volume in your list of "Works Consulted."

Next, click on the highlighted title of the work, which is a hyperlink that will take you directly to facsimile text images of the work, beginning with the volume's title page.

Bysshe's The Art of English Poetry includes three sections likely to be of use to anyone writing an "eighteenth-century" poem:

• "Rules for Making English Verse," which contains a great deal of both general and specific information on eighteenth-century poetry, as well as on rhyme and scansion, stanzaic forms, and specific genres and modes. This is a vital first place to begin.
  
  
• "A Dictionary of Rhyme," which is useful for establishing "proper" eighteenth-century rhymes, as well including a very useful preface on the subject.
  
  
• "A Collection of the Most Natural, Agreeable, and Noble Thoughts of the Best English Poets," which provides exemplary passages from (mostly) seventeenth-century poetry organized by theme. This, too, should be most useful for those seeking to imitate the characteristic modes of the period's poetic language and theme.

These sections, and their constituent subsections, can all be accessed easily through the electronic "Table of Contents" included in the database. Click on the hyperlink entitled "eTable of Contents" that appears near the top of each page of the text.