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English Miscellanies consisting of various Pieces of Divinity, Morals, Politicks, Philosophy and History; as likewise of some choice Poems; all collected out of the most approved Authors in the English Tongue [etc.] … Vol. I[–II].

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Second edition, revised, of John Tompson’s important English Miscellanies, expanded to almost twice the size of the first edition, including up-to-date content published since 1737.

New to this edition are Pope’s The Universal Prayer and ten letters (as well as several written to him); two new poems by Prior (an ‘Ode presented to the King’, 1695, and ‘Henry and Emma’), and two by Addison (‘An Account of the Greatest English Poets’ and A Letter from Italy to Lord Halifax), as well as his essay ‘Of Christian Religion’; letters and poems by Elizabeth Rowe, and an elegy by her son after her death in 1737; two long extracts from Glover’s political epic Leonidas (1737); and two full plays – The Non-Juror by Colley Cibber, and James Thomson’s Agamemnon (1738); as well as two numbers each from the Free-Thinker and The Guardian. The volume also contains, significantly, what is almost certainly the first appearance in Germany of any part of Edward Young’s The Complaint, or Night Thoughts (1742-6) – here the long meditation on death that closes the third ‘night’. Young’s fame was to grow nowhere greater than in Germany, where he was read by Klopstock, Lessing, Wieland, and Goethe, and his name became a battle-cry for the Sturm und Drang movement. The first German translations from the poem appeared in periodical form in 1749-50.

ESTC lists eight copies, but only BL in the UK and none in the US.

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BARCLAY, Alexander.

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ILLUSTRATED BY THE AGENCY OF THE DAGUERREOTYPE IRVING, Washington, and Felix DARLEY (illustrator).

Rip van Winkle; a posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker … Illustrated with six Etchings in Steel, by Charles Simms, from Drawings by Felix Darley (New York).

First English edition, rare, first published as Illustrations of Rip Van Winkle (New York, 1848) in oblong folio. For this more compact English edition the publisher and early photographic entrepreneur Joseph Cundall made an early use of photography: ‘The present illustrations have been reduced from the originals, which are much larger, by the agency of the daguerreotype, and I hope that the expression of every line has been most faithfully preserved’. Simms would most likely have traced the images that the daguerreotypes transferred to the engraved plates, though he also went on to publish photolithography.

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