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A handsome copy in red morocco of one of the most interesting poetical miscellanies of the late seventeenth century. This collection marks the poetical debut of William Congreve, at the age of twenty-two. His contributions include two imitations of Horace, a Pindaric ode called ‘Upon a Lady’s Singing’, addressed to the well-known soprano, Arabella Hunt, and two songs, ‘The Message’ and ‘The Decay’, signed only with initials. Also of particular interest are three poems by Aphra Behn, all printed here for the first time: ‘On a Conventicle’, ‘Venus and Cupid’ and ‘Verses design’d by Mrs. A. Behn, to be sent to a fair lady, that desir’d she would absent herself, to cure her love’, the last one being ‘left unfinished’.
This is one of the earliest productions of Charles Gildon, at the start of his long and productive, if sometimes controversial, literary career. His own contributions include the translation from Dacier, two poems addressed ‘To Syliva’, an imitation of Perseus and a ten-page dedication to Cardell Goodman, a prominent and wealthy actor, who Gildon clearly had in his sights as a patron. ‘As to the book, Sir, I present you with, I am extreamly satisfy’d to know, that it is a present worth your acceptance; for I may say that there has scarce been a collection which visited the world, with fewer trifling verses in it. I except my own, which I had the more encouragement to print now, since I had so good an opportunity of making so large an attonement, with the wit of others for my dulness, and that I hope will chiefly excuse them to you, as well as convince the world of the real value I have for you, when it sees me prefix your name to no vulgar book, of my own composing, but to one that ows [sic] its excellence to the generous contributions of my friends of undoubted wit’ (Epistle Dedicatory, p. xi).

The first Dublin edition of John Moore’s powerful novel written as an attack on the French revolution. It takes the form of thirty-four biographical sketches of famous politicians, public figures, senior ranking military officers and other wealthy celebrities of the day. Dr Moore was physician to Douglas, 8th Duke of Hamilton, and had accompanied him on his Grand Tour in the 1770s. He returned to the Continent with Lord Lauderdale and was in Paris in 1792 during the Revolution. This work contains many eye-witness accounts of events and observations made during those travels. Also included are accounts of dashing feats by a young English officer who is in fact Moore’s son, General Moore. The second volume contains the ‘Memoirs of a French Lady of Quality’.

The author’s first book, published when she was 26. The daughter of William Whateley, a gentleman farmer at Beoley in Worcestershire, Miss Whateley appears to have had little formal education but she loved literature and began to write poetry at an early age, contributing poems to the Gentleman’s Magazine as early as 1759. These, and some other poems in manuscript, attracted the attention of some distinguished contemporaries including William Shenstone, William Woty and John Langhorne, who set in motion a scheme to publish a volume by subscription, to which Langhorne contributed some prefatory verses. The 24 page subscription list contains some 600 names, including Elizabeth Carter, Erasmus Darwin, Mrs. Delany and one Rev. Mr. J. Darwell, the man Miss Whateley was to marry. John Darwall, Vicar of Walsall, was also a poet as well as a composer. The husband and wife together ran a printing press and she wrote songs for his congregation which he set to music. They also had six children together, to add to his six from a previous marriage.
The collection includes a number of pastoral poems - ‘artless rural Verse’ as she describes her ‘Elegy Written in a Garden (pp. 56-59) - several odes and poems addressed to individuals as well as some poems reflecting contemporary debate such as that ‘Occasioned by reading some Sceptical Essays’ (pp. 53-55). The final poem in the collection balances the prefatory verses supplied by one of her patrons: ‘To the Rev. Mr. J. Langhorne, on reading his Visions of Fancy, &c.’. Also included is a poem addressed to her future husband: ‘Ode to Friendship. Inscribed to the Rev. Mr. J. Darwall’:
‘Hail! Friendship, Balm of ev’ry Woe!
From thy pure Source Enjoyments flow,
Which Death alone can end:
Tho’ Fortune’s adverse Gales arise,
Tho’ Youth, and Health, and Pleasure flies,
Unmov’d remains the Friend’ (p. 101).
With a seven page dedication to the Hon. Lady Wrottesley, at Perton. The contents leaf, printed as part of the last signature, is here bound at the end. In some copies it has been bound at the front. Despite the wear to the spine, this is an appealing copy in an attractive contemporary binding. A Dublin edition was published later the same year.

Second edition of this translation of MacPherson’s Ossian poems, first published as Poésies Galliques en vers français, Paris 1801. A note before the text, signed by the printers Capelle and Renand, state that they will take any printer or seller of pirated editions of this work, to court. Baour Lormian’s translation was certainly popular; even apart from any piracies, a fifth edition was published in 1827. With a dedication to Joseph Despaze, reading simply ‘Vous aimez Ossian: recevez ce travail comme un témoignage de mon estime et de mon amitié’. An attractive copy in a slightly snazzy binding.

The scarce first edition in French of John Banim’s novel, Peter of the Castle, first published in Dublin in 1826. The translation is by the travel writer and anglophile Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret, now mostly remembered as the translator of Walter Scott’s novels.
‘The Banims may be justly called the first national novelists of Ireland... Their ambition was to do for Ireland what Scott, by his Waverley Novels, had done for Scotland — to make their countrymen known with their national traits and national customs and to give a true picture of the Irish character with its bright lights and deep shadows’ (Mathew Flaherty, The Catholic Encyclopedia, New York 1907).

An excellent copy of Lockhart’s whimsical tour de force, a satirical picture of Scotland presented as a series of letters from the fictional Dr. Peter Morris, a portrait of whose dignified features stands as frontispiece to the first volume, to his kinsman in Wales, the Reverend David Williams. Alongside this non-existence of the letters’ author and recipient, the whole presentation of Lockhart’s work is jocular, with its ‘Epistle Liminary to the Second Edition’, in which the author specifies minute instructions for the publishing of this ‘second’ edition as a joint venture between Cadell and Davies and William Blackwood: ‘The First Edition being but a coarse job, and so small withal, I did not think of him’ and wishing to discuss Peter’s Letters from Italy and Germany with the publisher. Another little bibliographical joke is the final page of advertisements in the third volume, giving an imaginary list of ‘Works by the Same Author’.
The text gives a detailed view of the Edinburgh of the day: the prominent men and women of the city, the clergy, the booksellers, the dandies; the courts, the coffee-rooms, the balls, dinner parties, dancing and social life; the university versus the English universities; the novels, the buildings, the ladies’ dress; the philosophers, the wits and the blue-stockings. ‘We can hardly be too grateful for so bold and skilful a picture of the social life of the age’ (J.H. Millar, A Literary History of Scotland, pp. 518-519). The writing capitalises on the intimacy of the letter form and no attempt is made to spare any of the dignitaries mentioned. Inevitably, Lockhart’s book caused more than its share of offence, ‘especially to the Whigs, by its personalities, and perhaps, as Scott said, by its truth’ (DNB).

A good copy in contemporary red morocco of a charmingly illustrated collection of poems. Originally published in a Dublin edition of 1791, this is the first edition to include the sequence of beautiful illustrations after Stothard, engraved by D. Harding, William N. Gardiner and Birrel. The text is divided into two sections, the first entitled ‘Elfin Eclogues’, comprising three eclogues, the first two of which feature characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the second and longer section is entitled ‘Odes’; this begins with an ‘Ode to Music’ which is accompanied by engraved plate and followed by notes. Further Odes follow on ‘War’, ‘Morning’, ‘Evening’, ‘The Glow-Worm’, ‘Hope’, ‘Love’ and ‘Youth’. A final section includes four ‘Elegaic Odes’, with a couple of touching pictures of youths mourning in graveyards. In addition to the engraved plate accompanying the ‘Ode to Music’, each poem has an engraved head-piece and there are tail-pieces throughout.

A collection of poems by the physician, dissenter and writer John Aikin, printed by his friend Joseph Johnson. Aikin spent his early career as a surgeon but when he found this unprofitable he turned to medicine, gained a degree at Leiden and established a medical practice in Norfolk where his sister, Anna Letitia Barbauld, the renowned educationalist, lived. Two of the poems in this collection, including the opening poem, are addressed to her. Aikin’s time in Norfolk was dogged by divisions between the dissenters and the established church. Among his circle, most of those who shared his literary tastes were on the side of the Church of England but Aikin, who felt keenly the injustice of excluding dissenters from office, published two pamphlets in 1790 in which he put forward a case for toleration. Although the pamphlets were published anonymously, Aikin’s authorship was widely known and it was largely this, as well as his public support of the French revolution, that lost him the support of most of his friends and patients and made his professional life in Norfolk unsustainable.
It was at this low point, largely ostracised for his dissenting views and before his successful move to London in 1792, that Aikin published these poems. In the preface he explained that mixed with the more general poems are a few that may not meet with impartial judgement. ‘They will certainly meet with as decided a condemnation from one set of readers, as they can possibly obtain applause from another... with a mind strongly impressed with determined opinions on some of the most important topics that actuate mankind, I could not rest satisfied without attempting to employ (as far as I possessed it) the noblest of arts, in the service of the noblest of causes’ (pp. iii-iv).
Aikin’s daugher and biographer, Lucy Aikin, described his move to London as ‘a blessed change’, as the dissenters there welcomed him as ‘a kind of confessor in the cause’ (Aikin, Memoir of John Aikin, 1823, p. 152). In 1796 he became literary editor of the Monthly Magazine, he also wrote for the Monthly Review and edited The Athenaeum for a while. His circle of friends there included Erasmus Darwin, John Howard, the philanthropist (whose biography he wrote and whose death is commemorated by a poem in this collection), Robert Southey, Thomas Pennant and the radical publisher Joseph Johnson. Aikin also wrote Johnson’s obituary for the Gentleman’s Magazine.

A scarce posthumous edition of Fergusson’s Poems on Various Subjects, first published in 1773. It was shortly after the publication of these poems that Fergusson started suffering depression. He then, in falling down a flight of stairs, suffered a serious blow to his head from which his reason and his health never recovered. He died in the Edinburgh Bedlam in the following year, aged 24. His poetry was later made popular by Robert Burns, who saw in him his own precursor. In 1787 Burns erected a momument at Fergusson’s grave in Canongate Kirkyard, commemorating him as ‘Scotia’s Poet’.
In the same year, Smith of Paisley also printed Fergusson’s The Ghaists: a kirk-yard eclogue (ESTC t184779, at NLS only).

An elegant society novel by an obscure Scottish writer, author of at least one other novel, Geraldine, or Modes of Faith and Practice, London 1820. Private Life, a readable tale of the rising middle class and a young woman’s experience of it, enjoyed considerable popularity, running to second and third editions (in 1830 and 1835) as well as a New York edition of 1829.

One of Beckford’s most readable and entertaining works, his Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha is an idealised compression of several visits to Portugal into one single twelve-day journey, based on diary notes made during a visit in 1794 - a trip during which he did not actually visit Batalha at all. However, it was his visits to Batalha which enchanted him and which inspired him in his designs for Fonthill Abbey, even though his impressions were not published until so many years after the event.
‘[Beckford’s] Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha is a charming, heavily humorous concoction... some biographers rate this short piece as his finest writing, and it is indeed a delightful evocation of a lost world, authentic in detail even if contrived in construction’ (Timothy Mowl, William Beckford: Composing for Mozart, 1998, pp. 217-300).
This copy has a piece of leather missing from the top of the spine, which rather mars its looks. Curiously, it contains an amusing piece of its history in the quotation sheet from a previous sale which is loosely inserted. ‘This is the best I have been able to find so far’, writes John Lyle, New and Second-hand Bookseller, to P. O’R. Smiley, Esq, of Victoria House, Ampleforth, Yorks. ‘Indeed, the only one. If you wish me to buy it for you, please reply at once to make sure of securing it’. Evidently, Philip O’Riordan, who was Head of Classics at Ampleforth College, replied in time to secure the volume, as it bears his booklabel. It set him back the princely sum of £3 post free.

A very handsome copy of the third of Horace Smith’s popular historical novels. A friend of Shelley and Leigh Hunt and co-author, with his brother James, of a brilliant book of parodies, Rejected Addresses, published in 1812, Horace Smith wrote numerous novels, all of which, including the present one, were strongly influenced by Walter Scott.

A good, fresh copy in original condition, uncut and stitched as issued, of Lady Manners' poem about the history of poetry, dedicated to her son. Originally from Cork, Catherine Rebecca Grey came to live in England in 1790 on her marriage to William Manners, later Lord Huntingtower of Leicester. The nostalgic Irish landscapes of her first volume of poetry, with its tales of lovers in Norman times, brought her much popularity, earning her the compliment, ‘a most accomplished lady’, in the Gentleman’s Magazine.
The present poem, Manners’ second and last publication, also received a favourable review in the Gentleman’s Magazine, where she was praised for succinctly characterising ‘the thematic and moral concerns of poets from ‘matchless Homer’ to ‘enlightened Johnson’. The extensive catalogue of ancient poets, including Pindar, Theocritus, Lucretius, and Tasso, and English poets since Chaucer, reveals discerning intelligence and wide reading. Poetry is enlisted to lead the way to moral truth; “Addison’s enlighten’d page / Charmed while it reformed the age”; and “Piety’s seraphic flame / Mark(s) enlighten’d Johnson’s name”’ (GM, August 1799).

First and only Irish edition of this scarce translation of La Fontaine’s Familie Saint Julien, which follows the life and misfortunes of an émigré from the French revolution. La Fontaine’s novel formed the third volume of his Familiengeschichten, a collection of loosely linked novels published in Berlin in eleven volumes between 1797 and 1804. Two rival English translations were published, the first under the title Saint Julien; or, Memoirs of a Father, London, J. Bell, 1798 and the second, ‘copiously and accurately translated’, was published by William Lane at the Minerva Press in 1799. This Cork edition uses the Minerva Press translation, which claimed to be greatly superior to ‘any other copy which may be obtruded on [the public’s] judgement... The translator has closely followed the German Original; the story is copiously and accurately told, without any abbreviation or mutilation; its language improved, where the idiom of the German required, and made soft to the English ear’ (see GR&W).
‘This Work has been read in France with uncommon avidity, - Switzerland put it into the hands of her children, - Germany idolized it, - the whole Continent admires the genius, the language, the pathos... the misfortunes of a single family... have awakened the compassion even of Parisians... Let him who prefers philosophy to piety, - public crimes to domestic affections, - plunder to property, - massacre to protection, - let him read SAINT JULIEN. Saint Julien may be used as the common appellation for all the suffering wretches whom France brands with the name of Emigrants... Read, my countrymen, - read, and you must feel, - feel, and you must curse the effects of modern, enlightened, impracticable Liberty’ (Introduction to the Minerva Press edition, not included in this Cork edition).
‘This is a tale of some interest founded on the domestic calamities produced by the French revolution. The Shandean traits of character in the beginning of the story would better have been omitted, as they are neither preserved nor remembered as the story proceeds’ (Critical Review, June 1799).
Another of the Lafontaine family tales was translated into English and published as The Family of Halden, London, J. Bell, 1799.
The Minerva Press original of this translation is scarce, with only the BL and Virginia listed in ESTC and NLS, Yale, Minnesota and Queensland added by OCLC. The Bell translation similarly scarce, with ESTC and OCLC listing copies at BL, Bodleian, Syracuse, UCLA and Illinois.

The scarce first English edition of Fabliaux ou contes du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, Paris 1779, compiled and edited by Legrand d’Aussy, conservator of French manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale. The work consists of 37 ‘original stories, serious and comic’ taken from French legends and, as such, presenting a very different impression on the English reader, who would have been introduced for the first time to many of the tales (although some, notably the Arthurian tales, would have been well enough known). The work is prefaced by a longish essay by the anonymous translator on the origin and nature of legend and fables. The tales are accompanied by explanations of what is known about each story and where it has been reworked: ‘with an account of the imitations and uses that have since been made of them, by Bocasse [Boccacio], Molière, Bossuet, La Fontaine, Racine, Corneille, Voltaire, Rousseau, and other modern authors’ (advertisement).
Samuel Badcock wrote in the Monthly Review: ‘These Tales shock probability. We cannot realise many of the incidents, yet they discover a vigorous and wild imagination. They awaken curiosity; and as they are generally short, they are seldom tedious: and we easily suffer ourselves to be carried away by the pleasing illusion into the land of inchantment [sic]’ (MR 76 p. 61).

A handsome copy of Smollett’s popular romance about the dastardly villain and self-styled count, Ferdinand. This is one of two 1753 editions, the other with ‘T.’ Johnson in the imprint, also ‘at the Golden Ball in St. Paul’s Church-Yard’. This is not a rare book, but it is uncommon in this fresh condition.

Walpole’s masterpiece, said to be the first Gothic novel, was first published by Thomas Lownds under a 1765 London imprint although it first appeared on Christmas Eve in 1764. The preface to the first edition, in which the author claims that the work is a translation by William Marshall of a sixteenth century Italian manuscript, is included in the present first Dublin edition. In April 1765 a second London edition appeared with an important new preface in which Walpole revealed his authorship and discussed the new 'gothic' genre he had invented. This Dublin edition was probably printed before April 11th, as it does not include the second preface. It is very rare and is not listed by Summers, who lists some fifty editions of the text, both in English and in translation.
‘The assertion on the title-page that the story was written by Onuphrio Muralto is properly recorded as a literary hoax, not a forgery since Horace Walpole admitted his authorship as soon as the book succeeded. His disingenuous preface to the first edition, in which he asserted that he, William Marshal, was translating from a rare Italian volume printed in 1529, was perhaps planned as a shield against the scoffing and scornful, and has done the world little harm’ (Hazen p. 52).

Dodington left all his property to his cousin, Thomas Wyndham of Hammersmith, who in turn left it all to Henry Penruddocke Wyndham. In addition to the diary, it included a vast collection of Dodington’s private correspondence. Wyndham, a native of Compton Chamberlayne near Salisbury, also published a translation of the entries for Wiltshire in the Domesday Book, hoping that it might pave the way for a more general history of Wiltshire, for which he put up some money.

A good copy in an Irish binding of these two works lavishly illustrated by Lady Diana Beauclerk. The daughter of Charles Spencer, 3rd Duke of Marlborough, Lady Di, as she was known, suffered two miserable marriages, the first to Frederick St. John, 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke, during which they were both notoriously unfaithful, and the second to Topham Beauclerk (1739-1780), the great-grandson of Nell Gwyn and Charles II. Beauclerk was a close friend of Dr. Johnson and was known for his brilliant conversation, but he was also famous for his ill-humour and lack of personal hygiene: Fanny Burney recorded Edmund Burke’s reaction to the death of Beauclerk: ‘I never, myself, so much enjoyed the sight of happiness in another, as in that woman when I first saw her after the death of her husband’.
‘During [the years following her divorce] Lady Diana's artistic talents became particularly evident: she practised portraiture, and her enormous output of small drawings of fat cupids entangled in branches of grapes and little girls wearing mob caps gave place to larger and more ambitious groups of peasantry introduced into landscaped backgrounds. She worked chiefly in pen and ink, pastel, and watercolour. Essentially a designer, she successfully executed seven large panels in ‘soot ink’ (black wash), mounted on Indian blue damask and illustrating Horace Walpole's tragedy The Mysterious Mother. Apt to overrate her skills, Walpole placed these at Strawberry Hill in a specially designed hexagonal room named the Beauclerc closet. At the same time he opined absurdly that ‘Salvator Rosa and Guido could not surpass their expression and beauty’ (Anecdotes of Painting, 24.524). Lady Diana also enjoyed the patronage of Josiah Wedgwood, probably from 1785, when her designs, mostly those of laughing bacchanalian boys, were translated as bas-reliefs onto jasper ornaments, plates, and jugs; they proved to be enormously popular. In 1796 she illustrated the English translation of G. A. Burger's ballad Leonora and in 1797 The Fables of John Dryden; in both cases her illustrations were engraved mostly by Francesco Bartolozzi’ (ODNB). The other engravings in the Dryden are by Vandenberg, Cheeseman and Gardiner.

A lovely copy of this privately printed poem by a Sussex clergyman, who was a professor of poetry at Oxford and a fellow of Magdalen College. Hurdis set up his own printing press at his house in Bishopstone, near Seaford in Sussex, in 1796, from where he printed selections from his own lectures and poems. The Favorite Village is thought to be his best work and is a panegyric to Bishopstone, the village where he was born and where he eventually became the vicar. It is a nostalgic eulogy to the village, set within the framework of nature and the seasons and much influenced by the poetry of Cowper and Thomson.