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Rare first and only edition of a prize poem by journalist and literary critic Nicholas John Halpin, written while a student at Trinity College Dublin. Halpin (1790–1850) went on to publish several polemical pamphlets in support of the Church of Ireland in the 1820s, as well as several critical essays on Shakespeare and Spenser later in life (Oxford DNB). The present poem, dedicated to Charles Lennox, fourth Duke of Richmond and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, received universally excellent reviews, perhaps in part due to the subject matter. Jackson, p. 355. COPAC lists 2 copies only (BL, Cambridge), to which WorldCat adds 1 (Missouri).

First edition of this anonymous verse romance—a Scott-inspired medievalist episode set in the fourteenth-century moated castle in East Sussex. ‘An inoffensive grunter of the octo-syllabic sty’ (Monthly Review). Jackson, p. 430.

First edition. ‘an epic of the class of Southey’s Madoc and Landor’s Gebir... The subject is the Saxon invasion of Britain and the ‘bright city’ is Gloucester. ‘He was educated under Dr Burney at Greenwich, and subsequently at Eton College and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where his career was remarkably brilliant. He matriculated on 25 May 1810, and graduated BA (1814), MA (1816), and BD and DD (1849). In 1812 he won the Newdigate prize with an English poem on the ‘Apollo Belvidere’, which was considered by A. P. Stanley the most perfect of Oxford prize poems. Jackson, p. 437.

First edition. An original narrative poem by an important linguist and translator who had been the first to introduce adequate samples of ancient Scandinavian and Icelandic literature to English readers. Byron mentions him in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809):

‘Herbert shall wield Thor’s hammer, and sometimes
In gratitude thou'lt praise his rugged rhymes’. Jackson, p. 393.

First edition. Scottish antiquarian and Sharpe ‘lived in and for the past’ (Oxford DNB) and this early collection is steeped in Scottish occult lore and witchcraft (in which Sharpe was an acknowledged expert). Inspired by Scott, who became a lifetime friend and correspondent, the author spent a short spell at Oxford, but returned to Edinburgh in 1813, where he lived until his death in 1851. He left one of the most extensive collections of antiquities ever accumulated by a private individual in Scotland. Jackson, p. 310.

First edition, the second of two verse collections by a successful Edinburgh miniature and silhouette painter. Several poems are in Scots dialect and at least two are on artistic subjects: ‘Song, The Enamoured Painter’ and ‘Epistle to a Friend, on the Decay of Taste for the Fine Arts in Scotland, 1812’. This is a subscriber’s copy, one of two copies ordered by Archibald, twelfth Earl of Eglinton (restorer of Eglinton Castle). Painter Henry Raeburn is among the other subscribers. Not in Jackson.

First edition. Paterson was born in 1790, the son of a stone carver. He attended Edinburgh University before becoming Professor of English at Jena. He was ordained in 1837 and was a minister of the Free Church at Kirkud. ‘This Poem is written in direct imitation of the style of W. Scott: and as an imitation it must be allowed to have a very fair proportion of merit’ (The British Critic). Jackson, p. 381.

First edition of the posthumously collected poems and letters of William Isaac Roberts, a precocious young poet who died at the age of twenty in 1806. Despite his youth, he was evidently able to earn the respect of a number of important writers of the day, including Robert Southey, who helped prepare the present edition and wrote glowingly of Roberts in his correspondence to Neville White in March 1810: ‘I want your assistance in a business in which I am sure it will interest you to give it. A youth of Bristol, by name William Roberts, died of consumption about two years ago, at the age of nineteen … The family had known better days … and one calamity following another, has reduced them very greatly … William was a youth of great genius, and a few days before his death he bequeathed his poems in trust to his two intimate friends to be published for the benefit of his sister, that being all he had to bequeath, and his passionate desire (like that of Chatterton) was to provide for her … My hope is that such a sum may be raised as will be sufficient to place Eliza Roberts in a situation respectably to support herself and her parents. I do not yet know what extent the publication will run to, but as soon as this is settled, I will beg you to beg subscriptions … certainly he was a youth of great genius and most uncommon promise, which it is my firm belief, founded upon the purity of his life and principles and the rectitude of his feelings, that he would amply have fulfilled, if it had not pleased God to remove him so early from this sphere of existence’ (Keswick, 11 March 1810).

The young poet’s tragic fate clearly resonated with readers, as the length of the subscription list attests (pp. xxxiii–liii; among them Edward Jenner, Thomas De Quincey, and William Roscoe), and is rendered doubly (R/r)omantic when coupled with the volume’s description of how his young love and poetic muse died at a tender age as well: ‘An interesting young lady, into whose society he was introduced during an excursion that he made so early as the year 1803, appears to have awakened in his bosom such emotions of tenderness and affection as death only could extinguish. Her subsequent illness and decease, on which he so feelingly expiates in some of his letters, puts a melancholy termination to his fondly cherished hopes’ (p. xvii). Johnson, p. 767; not in Jackson.

First published in 1807.

First edition—Highland poetry inspired by the mountain landscape of Craig Phadrig, which is topped by an ancient Pictish hillfort. Carey muses on the legends of Macbeth (including the Weird Sisters), on the parallel between Macbeth and Napoleon Bonaparte), and Scottish history up to Culloden. Jackson, p. 348; Johnson, Provincial Poetry, 163; Aubin, p. 373.

First edition. Following The Borough in Crabbe’s output, these 21 Tales in verse are arguably his masterpiece and were warmly received by his admirers. ‘Several of Crabbe’s favourite themes are explored in multiple tales: exile and return, radicals and libertines as forces of social destruction, social inequality, and love and courtship’ (Oxford DNB).. Jackson, p. 364.

Sole edition of verse by a Liverpool poet, the son of actor Charles Lee Lewes. The poems are on contemporary patriotic themes (Nelson and Napoleon are frequent subjects) and some are in Irish and Scottish mode. Among the latter, the long poem Wallace (with notes) occupies the final 50 pages, and is the subject of the unsigned wood engraved frontispiece. Johnson 533; not in Jackson.

FIRST AND ONLY EDITION of a provincial poem in four cantos aiming ‘To reward virtue and discourage vice’ (p. x) through its portrayal of the steadfast Angela, who earns herself a life of domestic felicity by being ‘an example to the sex, that true virtue is able to surmount all obstacles’ (p. xx). A quick read this poem is not, but do not fear, for as the author states in his preface, ‘the dull passages, may, by their contrast, heighten, and serve as a sort of foil to the more interesting ones!’ (p. xii). The preface, like the poem itself, does a great deal of moralizing, including a section condemning suicide (‘How weak—how mad! When a few short years,--a very few days,--nay, even moments, might summon him into the Awful Presence by a messenger from on high!’, p. xiv) and another praising women, though he makes sure to temper his admiration by reminding women their place (‘To the policy of a state, the female sex is in no small degree indebted’, p. xvi).

We have been able to find only one other poem by the author, ‘The Angler’, listed in a July 1819 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, though we have been unable to locate any copies institutionally, in auction records, or on the market. Not in Jackson or Johnson.

First edition of this collection of verse by the young tutor to Edward Jenner’s children, which also contains journal extracts, together with addresses and verses on the benefits of vaccination. Worgan (1790-1809) was ‘a consumptive boy of precocious ability whom Jenner took into his household, nominally as a tutor to his sons.’ Jackson, p. 344.

First and only edition of a book of poems that the author ‘never would have published’ had it not been ‘in compliance with the wishes of many of his friends, relying on whose superior judgment, he launches his little volume, with all its defects, into the world; if it contributes any thing in a harmless way to the amusements of a winter’s evening, it is the extent of the author’s ambition, and the end for which any thing of his was originally composed’ (Preface). Included are several poems about Burns and a number of poems reflecting on the poet’s everyday life, including a ‘Song when the Author was Librarian to the Dalkeith Subscription Library’.

First collected edition, including odes to Walter Scott, Grimaldi, Kemble, Godwin, and Cobbett. Brothers James (1775–1839) and Horace (born Horatio, 1779–1849) Smith made their name as writers and humourists, and ‘shared a taste for wit, theatre, fashionable entertainments, and light verse. Horace Smith’s first literary ventures were novels of contemporary manners, characterised by lively dialogue … [both] contributed regularly to Hill’s Monthly Mirror, from 1807 to 1819, to William Combe’s short-lived magazine The Pic-Nic, and wrote several prefaces to plays in Cumberland’s new edition of Bell's British Theatre’ (Oxford DNB). The present edition was published by Millar to capitalise on the lasting success of the brothers’ highly popular parody Rejected Addresses (first published 1809), and contains poems mainly penned by James that appeared in Hill’s Monthly Mirror. A second volume was ostensibly planned but never published, so far as we can trace.

John Keats writes the following character sketch of the two brothers in a 23 January 1818 letter describing a dinner out: ‘They only served to convince me how superior humour is to wit, in respect to enjoyment. These men say things which make one start, without making one feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have all a mannerism in their very eating and drinking, in their mere handling of a decanter.’ Jackson, p. 368.

First edition, posthumously published, this copy with a fitting provenance, from the library of the Chateau de Cirey. Helvétius had been encouraged in his philosophy by Voltaire, who sent him a copy of his work on Newton and invited him to stay at the Chateau de Cirey. The inscription, though abbreviated is almost certainly that of Diane-Adelaide de Simiane, herself an important literary figure. Her early life was colourful and she came to Cirey in 1795 after a period of incarceration during the Terror. Prior to that she had been married to Charles-François de Simiane, who had served with Lafayette in America and who died in France in 1787. The death was publicly explained as a hunting accident, but the circumstances were mysteriousl and suggest suicide; Charles-François was almost certainly homosexual and his wife Diane-Adélaïde had pursued a long affair with Lafayette in the 1780s. After her husband’s death madame de Simiane never remarried. She amassed a fine library at Cirey.

The introductory biography is by Saint-Lambert. Since the outcry over his De l’Ésprit (1758), Helvétius’ works were all condemned and issued in clandestine editions, usually outside France. Even after his death Le Bonheur was printed in Germany, with a false Londres imprint. The work is listed in Darnton’s, Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France 1769-89, 64. Several editions followed this one, including two others of the same year and the same imprint, but with the title printed in black and/or a different pagination. The first edition is rare. Smith, Bibliography of the writing of Helvétius, B.1; Higgs, Bibliography of Economics, 1751-1775, 5624; Tchemerzine VI, 190a (title pages illustrated).

Popular music in the reign of Louis XIV. A rare yearly part of the Livres d’Airs de differents autheurs, published annually between 1658 and 1694 and containing the most popular airs of the year, circulated otherwise either orally or in fugitive form (manuscript or print). Most of the songs are in two or three parts arranged across a double-page opening. RISM Recueils, p. 560, 1679 3; Goulet, Poésie, musique et sociabilité au XVIIe siècle. Les livres d’airs de différents auteurs publiés chez Ballard de 1658 à 1694, Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004.

First edition, a powerful evangelical sermon on the text: ‘He that winneth souls is wise’ (Proverbs XI, v. 30). Slave trader and evangelical clergyman of Olney Hymns (’Amazing Grace’) fame, Newton had become rector of the City church of St Mary Woolnoth in 1780, where his sermons attracted enormous congregations. 1788 was also the year in which he published Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade and in which his best-known portrait, by John Russell, was painted.

A very neat collection of popular songs, most from the 1850s, of the sort circulated in ephemeral printed and manuscript song sheets. Highlights include: Est-ce le hatchich qui t’a mis comme ça: an uncommon reference to hashish in this context, and a song (in common with several others in the manuscript) for which we can find no printed source. Sung to the tune of ‘Aÿ chiquita’, this is a woman’s complaint to her suitor, with the chorus:

‘Est-ce l’absinthe, ou bien encore,
Le hatchich qui t’as mis, dis-moi,
Dans cet état que j’aborre,
Et tu veux m’aimer! Ah! Tais-toi.’

This is hardly Baudelaire, but a pleasing contemporary parallel to Les Paradis artificiels.

Others include Les Cris de Paris, Les Chemins de fer and Les Anges de la charité ou les inondés de 1856 and there are songs attributable to Pierre Dupont and Charles Durand, both popular in the 1850s and 60s. Some are in dialect and typically, the subjects tend towards love, drink and gastronomy, but there are also a couple alluding to the language of flowers. The compilation is scrupulously neat—and is presumably, in part, an exercise in penmanship.