COLERIDGE, S[amuel] T[aylor].
The Statesman’s Manual; or the Bible the best guide to political Skill and Foresight: a Lay Sermon, addressed to the higher Class of Society, with an Appendix, containing Comments and Essays connected with the Study of the inspired Writings …
London: Printed for Gale and Fenner … J. M. Richardson … and Hatchard … 1816.
8vo., pp. 65, [3], xlvii, [1]; title-page and final page a little dusty, else a very good copy in modern quarter calf; inscription (slightly cropped) to head of title-page: ‘S. E[?]. Spring Rice / from his affectionate friend / Aubrey de Vere'.
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The Statesman’s Manual; or the Bible the best guide to political Skill and Foresight: a Lay Sermon, addressed to the higher Class of Society, with an Appendix, containing Comments and Essays connected with the Study of the inspired Writings …
First edition of the first of Coleridge’s ‘Lay Sermons’, written in Highgate at the house of James Gillman, to whom Coleridge had come as an in-patient for his opium addiction.
Written largely in response to the enactment of the Corn Laws in 1815, The Statesman’s Manual recommended the Bible as a political model for statesmen and the ruling classes. Hazlitt attacked the work before he had even read it, in The Examiner, and then in the Edinburgh Review.
The prolific Irish poet Aubrey Thomas Hunt de Vere (1814-1902), son of the poet Sir Aubrey de Vere, venerated Wordsworth and Coleridge in his youth; though he would not meet the latter, he became a close friend and correspondent of his daughter Sara. In his reading of Coleridge he was specifically preoccupied by his philosophy and religious thought. The recipient of this copy was Stephen Edmond Spring-Rice, de Vere’s cousin.
