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A delightful example of the most charming of David Bryce’s ‘Ellen Terry’ series of miniature literary sets. The 40 volumes include the plays, the sonnets, a biographical sketch and a glossary. The editor was J. Talfourd Blair.

Gulliver's Travels was an overnight best-seller in France. Following swiftly on the publication of the English text in late October 1726, the first French language edition, by an anonymous translator, appeared in the Hague in January 1727. This Desfontaines translation followed some three months later, in April 1727. Although it was less faithful to the original, being heavily abridged and at times almost closer to an adaptation than a translation, it was in Desfontaines’ version that Gulliver took France by storm. This is the first issue of the first appearance of that translation and the first publication of Gulliver in France. The Privilège du Roy, advertised at the foot of the imprint, had been granted to Hypolite-Louis Guérin on 20th March 1727. On the following day he shared it with two other local printers: 'faisant part du present Privilege aux Sieurs Gabriel Martin & Jacques Guérin'. Accordingly, the same printing of this first edition appears with two other imprints on the titles of both volumes.
It was in this translation by Desfontaines’ that Swift’s work had a profound influence on French literature: ‘this shoddy but elegantly written version was repeatedly reissued in France well into the late 19th century, with a record 180 editions by the 1920s’ (Paul-Gabriel Boucé). Desfontaines went on to write his famous continuation, Le Nouveau Gulliver, which was also very popular and in turn saw translations into English, German and Italian. Graebar, who says that Desfontaines’ translation ‘outshines all later ones’, suggests that it was partly the abridged nature of Desfontaines’ version that ensured its success: ‘by reducing it to the expectations of his addressees, an approach that proved immediately as well as lastingly successful’.

A popular book of essays by the pacifist and enlightened educationalist, Vicesimus Knox. Following his degree at St. John’s College, Oxford, where he became a fellow and took orders, he became headmaster of Tonbridge School, taking over from his father who was suffering poor health. A charismatic headmaster whose works on practical education were very popular, the numbers of boys on the roll rose from 20 to 80 during his long tenure there (he was headmaster for 34 years), but they began to fall back again on account of his very public criticism of British foreign policy in a series of articles written for the Morning Chronicle and a number of sermons preached in Brighton on the subject of pacifism. ‘Offensive war’, he argued, was ‘at once detestable, deplorable and ridiculous’ and he criticised the ‘military machine’ as being created by a corrupt administration.
Knox’ political views grew out of his ‘benign religious vision’ (ODNB), which also informed his educational and conduct writings, such as the present collection. As an essayist, his style is easily accessible and he believed it to be the best genre for communicating his ideal of civic sensibility to the middle classes: ‘I address not my book to systematical and metaphysical doctors, to deep, erudite, and subtle sages, but to those who, without pretending to be among the seven wise men (a later edition adds ‘the liberal merchant, the inquisitive manufacturer, the country gentleman and the various persons who fill the most useful departments in life’) have no objection to kill a little time, by perusing at their leisure the pages of a modern volume’ (I, x).
The third volume has a diverting chapter, ‘Of Reading Novels and trifling Books without Discrimination’, in which Knox, well known for his dismissal of sentimental novels and his attacks on the morality of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, satirises the world of the circulating library: ‘I have smiled at hearing a lady admire the delicacy of sentiment which the author of some novel, which she had just been reading, must possess, though I knew it to be the production of some poor hireling, destitute of learning and taste, knowledge of life and manners, and furnished with the few ideas he had by reading the novels of a few preceding years. He had inserted in the title-page, ‘By a Lady’, and various conjectures were often hazarded in my hearing concerning the authoress. Some hinted that they were acquainted with her, and that it was a lady of quality. Others knew it to be written by an acquaintance of their own; while all agreed in asserting, it must be by a lady, the sentiments were so characteristically delicate and refined. You may conjecture how much I was disposed to laugh when I knew it to be the production of a comb-maker in Black Boy Alley’ (III, 151-152).
This was a popular work, with a Dublin edition published in the same year and further London editions in 1790 and 1795. A ‘Basil’ edition was published by James Decker in conjunction with the Paris booksellers Levrault frères, in 1800 and it was reprinted as part of Robert Lynam’s British Essayists, vols. xxix and xxx, London, 1827.