PRAISING THE INTREPID HARE AND SAMUEL RICHARDSON
GARDINER, John Smallman.
The Art and the Pleasures of Hare-Hunting. In six Letters to a Person of Quality …
London: Printed by R. Griffith … 1750.
8vo., pp. viii, 56, with a half-title (loose at head); final page dusty, some light foxing, but a good copy, disbound.
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The Art and the Pleasures of Hare-Hunting. In six Letters to a Person of Quality …
First edition, scarce, an eloquent and amusing account of hare-hunting, the first monograph on the subject in English, comprising letters on the superiority of hare-hunting to fox-hunting (less dangerous, less laborious), on the best types of dogs, of trailing and starting hares, etc. Gardiner’s letter in praise of hares is noble stuff indeed: ‘They ramble through the Barn-Yard in the Night, and disregard the gaunt growling Mastiff; traverse the Orchard and the Garden, intrepid and fearless; explore the dangerous Pond-Head, nor dread the roaring waters …’.
In a curious literary preface, Gardiner wryly exhorts writers to expound on such ‘universal’ topics as pantomimickry and card games, and praises Samuel Richardson: ‘may many good Fortunes befall … he who wrote the Books, wherein are rehearsed, the Acts of Clarissa Harlow, and her Uncle Anthony [Clarissa was published in 1748]. Heavens! with what a marvelous Preciseness (as Cervantes says) do they describe every simple Circumstance!’ For himself, ‘I flatter myself there may be found some worn-out, decay’d, rheumatic, or gouty Harrier; whose Curiosity may lead him to pore into these Sheets’.
ESTC shows five copies in the UK, and two in the US: Princeton and Yale.
Schwerdt, I, 197 (‘a classic on hare hunting, which had for centuries been preferred to foxhunting’).
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The Meditations of Saint Augustine, from the Latin Original. By the Rev. J. Martin, O.S.A. …
First edition of this rare translation of the pseudo-Augustinian Meditationum Liber, an eleventh-century devotional text very popular in the Middle Ages.
INSCRIBED LEWIS, Wyndham.
The Lion and the Fox. The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare …
Reprint of the second edition of Lewis’s ‘first political book’, a collection of essays engaging with Shakespeare and Machiavelli first published in 1927 and then reissued by Methuen in 1951; inscribed in a very shaky hand ‘To Geoffrey Bridson from Wyndham / Oct 1956’.
‘The Lion and the Fox is shot through with original thinking on every subject that it takes up … The tone of the book is distinctly liberal, and its attitude towards the concept of despotic rule is one of suspicion and antipathy’ (Bridson, The Filibuster).
Laid in loose is a 1-leaf typescript of two sections from pp. 83-4 and 89-90 of ‘The Foxes’ Case’ by Lewis, published in The Calendar of Modern Letters 2:8 (October 1925), with a few corrections in pen and the note ‘original copy checked with DGB’ at the foot. The article included several passages subsequently incorporated into The Lion and the Fox.
See Bridson, ‘That Notorious Machiavel’, The Filibuster, pp. 1-18. Pound & Grover A6c note; Morrow & Lafourcade A7c note.