Category: English Literature

BOYS, John

An exposition of the festivall Epistles and Gospels, vsed in our English Liturgie. Together with a reason why the Church did chuse the same. …. The second part from the Purification of blessed Mary the Virgin, to the feast of S. Iohn the Baptist.

London, Imprinted for William Aspley, 1614.

£800

4to, pp. (iv) 159 (i); A2 B-L8 . Roman and Italic letter, sporadic Greek. Title-page within a plain double-fillet border, pages ruled in black with references section to the outer margin, head- and tailpieces. A crisp, untrimmed and surprisingly widemargined copy bound in modern speckled paper over boards with older label to front cover. A lovely copy. This is the second part of three texts forming ‘An Exposition of the Festival Epistles and Gospels, used in our English Liturgie’. The first part was published in 1613 and the third one in 1615. John Boys (1571-1625) was Dean of Canterbury. Before covering such high position, he proved himself as a very skilled preacher. While in service at St Mary’s, Cambridge, Archbishop Richard Bancroft took him into his favour, and he preached at Ashford, on the occasion of the primate holding his primary visitation there on 11 September 1607. Two years after, Boys published his first work, ‘The Minister’s Invitatorie, being An Exposition of all the Principall Scriptures used in our English Liturgie: together with a reason why the Church did chuse the same’. The work was dedicated to Bancroft, who had lately been made chancellor of the University of Oxford, and in the ‘dedicatorie epistle’ Boys speaks of his ‘larger exposition of the Gospels and Epistles’ as shortly about to appear. In 1611, ‘An Exposition of the Dominical Epistles and Gospels used in our English Liturgie throughout the whole yeere’ supplied a great need and had a very large and rapid sale, encouraging Boys to further his work. Archbishop Bancroft died in November 1610, and George Abbot was promoted to the primacy in the spring of 1611. Boys dedicated to him the present work, ‘An Exposition of the Festival Epistles and Gospels, used in our English Liturgie’. This second part includes a dedication “To my loving neighbours of Hollingburne, more principally to the Right Worthy Sr. Francis Barnham Knight, and Thomas Culpeper Esquire”.

ESTC S106192.

STERNE, Laurence (FOSCOLO, Ugo, tr.)

IMPORTANT PRESENTATION COPY OF FOSCOLO’S OWN TRANSLATION OF STERNE’S SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

STERNE, Laurence (FOSCOLO, Ugo, tr.). Viaggio sentimentale di Yorick lungo la Francia e l’Italia. Traduzione di Didimo Chierico [i.e. Ugo Foscolo]

 Pisa, dai torchi di. Gio. Rosini, 1813.

£7500

FRIST ITALIAN EDITION, 8vo, PRESENTATION COPY FROM FOSCOLO TO GIOVANNI LESSI, inscribed on half-title “A Giovanni Lessi/ Ugo Foscolo/ Candidamente Dona/ Firenze MDCCCXIII”, engraved portraits of Sterne and “Didimo Chierico” (Foscolo), uncut in nineteenth century vellum, spine gilt with red morocco title label.

Ugo Foscolo, original name Niccolò Foscolo, (1778, Zakynthos, Venetian republic [now Zákinthos, Greece]— 1827, Turnham Green, near London, England), poet and novelist whose works articulate the feelings of many Italians during the turbulent epoch of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the restoration of Austrian rule; they rank among the masterpieces of Italian literature. Foscolo, born of a Greek mother and a Venetian father, was educated at Spalato (now Split, Croatia) and Padua, in Italy, and moved with his family to Venice about 1793. There he moved in literary circles. In 1797 the performance of his tragedy Tieste made him famous. Foscolo’s early enthusiasm for Napoleon, proclaimed in his ode A Bonaparte liberatore (1797), quickly turned to disillusionment when Napoleon ceded Venice to Austria in the Treaty of Campo Formio (1797). Foscolo’s very popular novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802) contains a bitter denunciation of that transaction and shows the author’s disgust with Italy’s social and political situation. Some critics consider this story the first modern Italian novel. When the Austrians and Russians invaded Italy in 1799, Foscolo, with other Italian patriots, joined the French side. Made a captain in the Italian division of the French army after the defense of Genoa in 1800, he had commissions in Milan, Bologna, and Florence, where he found time to involve himself in many love affairs. Finally Foscolo was sent to serve in France (1804–06). During that period he translated some classical works and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, into Italian and wrote odes and sonnets. The dedicatee of the present copy was Foscolo’s friend Giovanni Lessi (1743–1817), a man of letters and prestigious academician, who contributed to promote Foscolo’s version of the Iliad. In 1807 Foscolo returned to Milan and established his literary reputation with Dei Sepolcri (c. 1820), a patriotic poem, written as a protest against Napoleon’s decree forbidding tomb inscriptions. In 1808 the poem won for its author the chair of Italian rhetoric at the University of Pavia. When the chair was abolished by Napoleon the next year, Foscolo moved on to Milan. The satirical references to Napoleon in his tragedy Aiace (first performed 1811) again brought suspicion on him; in 1812 he moved to Florence, where he wrote another tragedy, Ricciarda, and most of his highly acclaimed unfinished poem, Le grazie (published in fragments 1803 and 1818, in full 1822). In 1813 Foscolo returned to Milan. Napoleon fell the following year, the Austrians returned to Italy, and Foscolo, refusing to take the oath of allegiance, fled first to Switzerland and then in 1816 to England. Popular for a time in English society because he was an Italian patriot, Foscolo supported himself by teaching and writing commentaries on Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch for The Edinburgh Review and The Quarterly Review. He died in poverty. In 1871, with great national ceremony, his remains were moved from England and interred in the church of Santa Croce, in Florence.

CROWLEY, Aleister

A REMARKABLE PRESENTATION COPY WITH ADDITIONAL ANNOTATIONS BY THE AUTHOR

CROWLEY, Aleister. Moonchild. A Prologue.

 London, The Mandrake Press, 1929.

£6000

FIRST EDITION. 8vo. Original sea-green cloth, titles to spine gilt. With the pictorial Beresford Egan dust jacket almost completely intact, only upper part of dust jacket, covering head of spine, torn away. Text clean and crisp, flawless. An important presentation copy inscribed by the author on front endpaper: “To Clements Hassell with sincere admiration of a fine artist and appreciation of an excellent friend, from Aleister Crowley, Oct 8, ’32 e.v.”. This “Clements Hassell” person is likely to be identified with Hilary Clements Hassell (1871-1949), who was a British painter of interiors, landscapes and some coastal scenes. E.v. stands for ‘era vulgaris’, which is a Latin expression for “common era”. This is placed after the date to differentiate it from Crowley’s Thelemic calendar, which starts in 1904 (the date the author claimed he received the book of the law). On the rear endpaper, very presumably in Crowley’s own handwriting, appear details of a two-day schedule accompanied by planetary symbols. These symbols represent days of the week (Mars, i.e. Tuesday, and Mercury, i.e. Wednesday). Crowley mentions meeting times, the name “Foyle” a “lunch at Grosvenor House”, where it is known he gave a lecture on Magick in 1932: “In September 1932 Crowley was invited to a literary luncheon by Christina Foyle. Christina Foyle’s owned Foyle’s bookshop in London and held a literary lunch every year. This was a small coup for Crowley, to be invited as the guest of honour and speaker. Crowley spoke on The Philosophy of Magick which was well received. A queue of women formed at the end of the luncheon to have him autograph their books.” Marlene Peckwood, The Feng Shui Journey of Mr Aleister Crowley, 2012, P. 205.

PINDAR, Peter [pseud. of John Wolcot]

PINDAR, Peter [pseudonym of John Wolcot]. The Works of Peter Pindar, Esq.

 London, Published by J. Walker and J. Harris, 1809.

£850

12mo, four volumes, each one with a half-title, frontispiece, engraved title page and regular title page with Peter Pindar’s portrait being on the first volume. Ms. ex libris of Sir George-William Denys, Baronet, on front endpaper of each volume. Bound in a lovely gilt-ruled straight-grain red morocco (fourth volume with some worm tracking on front cover), inner dentelles, author and title to gilt spine, marbled pastedowns, a.e.g. A lovely set in a beautiful binding.

Peter Pindar was the pen name of John Wolcot (9 May 1738 – 14 January 1819), an English satirist who found that poetry paid better than his medical profession. Indeed, though trained as a physician and practising medicine, in 1780, Wolcot went to London and began writing satires. The first objects of his attentions were the members of the Royal Academy. For the historian of the fine arts the relevant items are his Lyric and Farewell Odes to the Royal Academicians for the years 1782, 1783, 1785 and 1786 (pp. 9-133), in which the painter Benjamin West and all its other leading members are unmercifully satirised, and the opening poem in his Subjects for Painters (pp. 445-506), but the poems as a whole well repay reading, particularly those that ridicule the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, King George III’s, and the Abyssinian traveller James Bruce. Other objects of his attack were Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, Hannah More, former bluestocking and playwright, and Bishop Porteus. Wolcot had a remarkable vein of humour and wit, which, while intensely comic to persons not involved, stung its subjects to the quick. He had likewise strong intelligence, and a power of coining effective phrases. In other kinds of composition, as in some ballads he wrote, an unexpected touch of gentleness and even tenderness appears. Among these are The Beggar Man and Lord Gregory. He died at his home in Latham Place, Somers Town, London, on 14 January 1819, and was buried in a vault in the churchyard of St Paul’s, Covent Garden.