Added to your basket:
Essays on several Subjects …

Checkout now

Second edition of seven essays of ‘considerable merit [that] display the easy scepticism and solid good sense and learning of the author to good advantage’ (Pforzheimer). They deal with self-interest; the mischief of learning; education; respect for antiquity; the virtues of modern men; passion; and the uncertainty of human knowledge, all ‘writ … in my idle hours, for my own entertainment’ (Preface). A ‘freedom from conventionality, and [an] air of comfortable cynicism … pervades them, a cynicism recognising the enormous prevalence of stupidity and falseness of all kinds, but also possessing a cheerful conviction of the possibilities of amendment’ (DNB).

This is a paginary reprint, to p. 159, of the first edition (1691), where ‘by compressing the Latin quotations, the text is typographically shortened by half a page’ (Pforzheimer).

Wing B 3349; Pforzheimer 70.

You may also be interested in...

WITH ARMS PRINTED IN GOLD [MULLIS, William].

A brief Account of the Blue Coat Hospital, and Public Library, in the College, Manchester, founded by Humphrey Chetham, Esq. in the Year 1651.

Sole edition, privately printed and very rare. William Mullis was the deputy librarian of Chetham’s Library, the oldest free public reference library in the English-speaking world. It was founded in 1653, along with the Blue Coat School (two years earlier), by bequests from the merchant and banker Humphrey Chetham. Both charities occupied the ‘venerable edifice’ built in 1461 to accommodate the priests of Manchester’s Collegiate Church.

Read more

[JOHNSON, Samuel].

A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. London: Printed for W. Strahan; and T. Cadell … 1775.

Unacknowledged second edition. Two thousand copies of the first edition were printed as far as sheet R when Strahan, sensing the demand, decided to increase the press run to four thousand. The 2000 overrun sheets, T-Z and 2A-2B, and a reprint of the earlier sheets A-D and F-R, may be identified by an asterisked signature on the first leaf of each gathering, needed to distinguish whether the sheets were to be bound with the twelve-line or six-line errata, five of the eleven errors having been corrected in the reprinting. Signature E does not have an asterisk (Todd thinks that it was the first sheet to be reprinted before the need to distinguish the settings was realised), nor does S, apparently deferred until the end and then worked off continuously in 4000 copies. These complications were due in no small measure to Johnson’s dilatory revision of proofs.

Read more