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A charming book-form trinket box, of unknown manufacture, but with other examples known to have been marketed in London in the late nineteenth-century. The monogram reads ‘M.S.’ (though admittedly it could also be ‘S.M.’) and it has been plausibly suggested that the reference is to Mary Queen of Scots, given the all-over thistle pattern. Mary was executed in 1587 and so it is just possible that these boxes were in some way marketed at the time of the three-hundredth anniversary, though we can do no more than offer this as a suggestion.

Sir Walter Scott here makes arrangements for a short sitting with sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey before lunching with Lady Shell[e]y. In 1820 Chantrey had produced his celebrated bust of Scott. A further marble version was made in 1828, with additional sittings by Scott, as alluded to in this letter. ‘The original bust in plaster was completed in 1820. It is now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. According to Chantrey’s ledger, five marble replicas were made, the most famous of which is that at Abbotsford. Begun in 1820, the Abbotsford bust was not completed until 1821, when Scott gave Chantrey a number of further sittings in the course of two visits to London. The Abbotsford bust remained in Chantrey’s studio from 1821 until 1828, and all the engravings and medallions representing Chantrey’s bust would appear to derive from it. Chantrey offered the bust as a gift to Lady Scott while visiting Abbotsford in May 1825... A third marble version was made for Chantrey's own studio in 1828, for which Scott gave further sittings, and which shows minor changes in the configuration of the face. This version was purchased by Sir Robert Peel in 1838 and is now in a private collection’ (Oxford DNB).

Frances Lady Shelley was one of the principal English diarists of the George III period and a close (if not always sympathetic) acquaintance of the Scotts.

A RARE FRENCH BROADSIDE ADVERTISING THE VIRTUES OF ‘SCOTCH PILLS’ OR ‘GRANA ANGELICA’ invented by the seventeenth-century Edinburgh physician Patrick Anderson, a medical treatment which remained popular in Scotland, England and France well into the nineteenth century. The long text in twelve chapters outlines the supposed virtues of the pills as a cure for almost any complaint. This French version imitates the English broadsides of the second half of the eighteenth century (there are several in ESTC) which themselves mimicked the form of Royal proclamations with woodcut arms at the head. It also reproduces the purported trademark of Anderson and his successor Isabelle Inglish, which seems to have been pirated as often as the pills themselves.

‘Some time after 1625 Anderson was appointed physician to Charles I. In 1635 he published in Edinburgh Grana angelica, a treatise in Latin which puffed his mild aperient pills, made with aloes, colocynth, and gamboge, and pronounced a sovereign remedy for cleansing the system after carouses. Anderson claimed to have brought the formula of the pill back from a trip to Venice about 1603’. (Oxford DNB).

First edition of the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’s’ first major success, the work which placed him on a par with Scott and Byron as fashionable poets of the 1810s. In dialect throughout, the poem imagines a return to Scotland of Mary Queen of Scots, and a poetical contest (the ‘Wake’) held in her honour at Holyrood. Jackson, p. 371.

First edition. An account of the author’s ‘pilgrimage’ to the Palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh, where French monarch Charles X had taken refuge (for the second time) following his deposition by the July Revolution in 1830. The object of his pilgrimage was not so much Charles himself, but his young nephew Henri, son of the Duke and Duchess de Berri, named regent of French in exile. A detailed report of this extraordinary young man is given, together with the striking silhouette portrait. The ‘Récit’ of the meeting is followed by various reflections on the author’s return journey through London, and then by a ‘rêve’ in which he dreams of a return to Paris and restoration of the monarchy under a young king Henri.

First edition of this critical jeu d’esprit,First edition of this critical jeu d’esprit, a contribution to the debate over the Elegy inspired by Johnson’s assessment in his Life of Gray (1777) and which was to continue well into the nineteenth century. It includes the complete text of the Elegy on pp. xii-xx. Young was professor of Greek at Glasgow University.

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—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 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’.

Morison’s pocket edition of Dunbar commences with a Life of Gavin Douglas, from a manuscript then in the possession of the Literary and Antqiuarian Society of Perth. Not in Jackson or Johnson.

First edition in French of Dunallan; or, Know what you judge (1825); the last published (but first written) work of this once much-read Presbyterian Scottish novelist (1782-1825). ‘Grace Kennedy's novels (at least eight) were all published anonymously and rapidly in the early 1820s, and met with considerable success, being reissued late into the nineteenth century...’ (Oxford DNB). Worldcat: NLS, Queen’s Public Library (NY) and Penn only outside continental Europe.

A very rare spurious edition of these erotic and bawdy poems by Burns and his circle, first published in 1799 (of which edition only 2 copies are known to survive). The title-page is headed ‘Not for maids, ministers or striplings’. The Roy collection of Robert Burns contains several similar reprints to ours (including our issue) each with differing title-pages giving ‘1827’.

‘Shepherds I have got the clap,
Stroking of my Anna;
My time’s filled up, oh sad mishap,
With taking salts and senna.
I for her King’s Place forsook,
Where girls I had past telling;
But now my pipe’s turned to a crook,
My b—, how they’re hanging...’ Roy collection of Robert Burns, p. 141 b.

First edition of this adaptation, published by subscription and dedicated to the Prince of Wales. According to the subscribers’ list, the Countess of Sutherland took two copies.

‘We know no reason that Mrs. Turner has to blush (as she does, in her modest address to her readers,) for a performance executed with strict fidelity, especially with the support of so very respectable a list of subscribers; and when it may even be added that, in some particular instances, she has even improved on her author …’ (Monthly Review). Jackson, p. 157.

First published the previous year. Edinburgh poet, Thomson’s Whist admirably reflects the eighteeneh-century appetite for the game, first described in detail by Hoyle in 1742.

First edition (a second edition was printed the following year) of this rather Ossianic performance. ‘A legendary tale has something in its nature apt to impose upon the imagination, by the venerable robe of antiquity in which it is usually veiled’ (Critical Review). John Tait (1748-1817) was a Writer to the Signet and afterwards judge of the Edinburgh Police Court (1805). He also wrote an elegy on Robert Fergusson (d. 1774), which appeared in the latter’s posthumous Poems, 1779. Jackson, p. 26.

First edition. Despite the mixed London/Edinburgh imprint it is clear that both volumes were entirely typeset in Scotland: the type ornaments and title vignettes are identical. Donaldson and Reid evidently printed a certain number of copies for Hawes et al. in London, but were not scrupulous about making sure all volumes had the correct imprint. This set is as issued.

This is an unusually good series of poems, by a Scottish medical man clearly the product of his enlightened century. Some subjects seem entirely modern, e.g. ‘The Monopolist’ (‘Sapo, condemn’d to love of gain, / Tortures for it his little brain’.) or, ‘An Elegy on the Cutting down of an Oak’, or ‘The Triumph of Vice. A Fragment’. There are several literary poems, including elegies on Joseph Addison and Edward Young, and a long satire called ‘Poetical Characteristics; or, an Estimate of the Advantages of Rhyming. In Three Cantos’, which pokes fun at Pope, Gay, Gray, Johnson, the author’s Scots contemporaries Blacklock and Ogilvie, and even at Lord Kames: ‘With Kames’s eye Lyncean view/ And pierce all Nature through and through’. ESTC: (Edinburgh imprint:) BL, NLS, Bodley, St. Andrews, Columbia, Harvard; (London imprint:) NY Academy of Medicine, Rice, Library of Congress, UCLA, Otago.

First edition of the only collection by David Sillar, youthful friend of Robert Burns, published by John Wilson, who had previously published Burns’s collection at Kilmarnock in 1786. It includes the poem ’To the author’ (pp.[9]-11), signed ‘R. B’., [Robert Burns]. Jackson, p. 151.

First edition. The passages of scripture ‘in the style of Ossian’ are in prose and verse and include ‘The Song of Deborah and Barak’, ‘Saul’s Death and David’s Lamentation’ and ‘The Tears of Salem’. The subscribers are mainly local to Northumberland and the Scottish Borders. Not in Jackson or Johnson. Scarce: ESTC: BL (2), Edinburgh, NLS, Bodley, Keble College, LC and Yale.