Eastern eclogues; written during a tour through Arabia, Egypt, and other parts of Asia and Africa, in the year M.DCC.LXX.VII.

London, for J. Dodsley, 1780.

4to, pp. 31, [1, advertisement]; handsome large engraved vignette to title showing Pompey’s pillar; very good in recent half calf over cloth boards, gilt lettering-piece to spine.

£850

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Eastern eclogues; written during a tour through Arabia, Egypt, and other parts of Asia and Africa, in the year M.DCC.LXX.VII.

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First edition of these travel-inspired poems by the Calcutta-born East India Company servant Eyles Irwin (1751-1817), composed during his journey from India to England in 1777, and containing several interesting references to the British presence in India.

When Irwin became embroiled in the political storm surrounding the governor of Madras, George Pigot, in 1776, he was temporarily suspended from the East India Company’s service. Seeking redress, he left India for England early in 1777. The Eastern eclogues were the fruit of his eleven-month journey, together with his travel narrative A series of adventures (1780), an advertisement for which occupies the final page here. Irwin would later return to India and serve as superintendent of the Company’s affairs in China.

Each of the four eclogues has a distinct setting and subject: in the ruins of Alexandria, with footnotes on Pompey’s pillar, Cleopatra’s Needle, and a Franciscan convent; in an Ottoman harem on the Arabian coast; on the last words and suicide of a Brahman who jumps from the pagoda at Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu, India; and on the ransoming of slaves at Tunis.

Based on a scene witnessed by Irwin in 1771, the third eclogue, ‘Ramah, or, the Bramin’, is perhaps the most interesting. While the Brahman criticises British rule and prophesises its defeat by Muslims, Irwin’s footnotes defend the East India Company’s actions: ‘The balance of power should be the principal object of every state, and the restoration of the king of Tanjore shews the Company to be attentive thereto’, he writes, for example. ‘Policy, as well as humanity, enforced this measure; which it is to be hoped, will obviate the prophecy of our Bramin, notwithstanding there is reason blended with his fanaticism.’

ESTC T972.

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