![LOVEDAY, R[obert].](/photos/187/main/full_187.jpg "LOVEDAY, R[obert].")
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8vo (163 × 105 mm), pp. [xvi] (including engraved frontispiece portrait by Faithorne), 280, [10] (advertisement). Contemporary sheep, with some expert repair. Minor worming to inside upper board and upper margin of prelims (just touching woodcut borders) and to blank lower margin of final 75 or so pages (mostly a single small hole), not affecting text, small chip to lower edge of title, not affecting text. Manuscript note in a contemporary hand to front endpaper, modern ex libris (Bent Juel-Jensen). A very good copy.
First edition. The letters and poems of Robert Loveday were published posthumously by his brother Anthony in 1659 and subsequently reprinted several times. Loveday’s education at Peterhouse, Cambridge, was interrupted by the Civil War and he became a secretary to the Clinton family; in this capacity he travelled extensively throughout England, spending time at the Clintons' seat, Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire, and at the Clares' residence, Thurland House, Nottinghamshire.
Loveday was an accomplished translator whose most notable work was a three-volume translation of La Calprenède's Cléopâtre but he is remembered mainly for his letters. By all accounts an unusually charming and attractive personality (even the running title here reads 'Loveday's Letters. The Perswasive Secretary'), Loveday's agreeable style may be illustrated by a touching display of fraternal love which he pays his brother: ‘am deep in your debt for abundance of loving expressions, and want words to tell you how tenderly I entertained them; the task is too big to let you know how dear you are to me; do me but the Courtesie to fancy an affection, pure, unbiassed, unreserved, that scorns limits, loaths change, and is onely less excellent than that which makes Angels clap their wings’.
Loveday died of tuberculosis in his mid thirties and several of the letters describe its undiagnosed progress. He had apparently been a patient of Sir Thomas Browne and it has been argued that Browne’s Letter to a Friend (published posthumously, 1690) was addressed to Loveday (‘The Occasion and Date of Sir Thomas Browne's "A Letter to a Friend"’, Frank Livingstone Huntley, Modern Philology, 48, No. 3, Feb., 1951.)
Loveday was an accomplished translator whose most notable work was a three-volume translation of La Calprenède's Cléopâtre but he is remembered mainly for his letters. By all accounts an unusually charming and attractive personality (even the running title here reads 'Loveday's Letters. The Perswasive Secretary'), Loveday's agreeable style may be illustrated by a touching display of fraternal love which he pays his brother: ‘am deep in your debt for abundance of loving expressions, and want words to tell you how tenderly I entertained them; the task is too big to let you know how dear you are to me; do me but the Courtesie to fancy an affection, pure, unbiassed, unreserved, that scorns limits, loaths change, and is onely less excellent than that which makes Angels clap their wings’.
Loveday died of tuberculosis in his mid thirties and several of the letters describe its undiagnosed progress. He had apparently been a patient of Sir Thomas Browne and it has been argued that Browne’s Letter to a Friend (published posthumously, 1690) was addressed to Loveday (‘The Occasion and Date of Sir Thomas Browne's "A Letter to a Friend"’, Frank Livingstone Huntley, Modern Philology, 48, No. 3, Feb., 1951.)
Wing L3225. ESTC lists 9 further seventeenth-century editions.
£850.00
keywords:
english
