[PEMBERTON, Henry].
Observations on Poetry, especially the epic: occasioned by the late Poem upon Leonidas.
London: Printed by H. Woodfall. Sold by J. Brotherton … J. Nourse … and T. Dodsley … 1738.
8vo., pp. xii, [2], 167, [1], with half-title; a very good copy, disbound.
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Observations on Poetry, especially the epic: occasioned by the late Poem upon Leonidas.
First edition, a piece of literary criticism inspired by Richard Glover’s long poem Leonidas (1737), ‘a high-minded epic on the virtuous resistance by the Spartan king (perhaps an optimistic portrait of Frederick [Prince of Wales]) to the effeminate and treacherous Persian army’ (Oxford DNB). Glover was a close friend of Pemberton, who had included Glover’s ‘Poem on Sir Isaac Newton’ in his View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (1728). In his Observations Pemberton puffs Glover’s characters, language and versification, placing him among the illustrious company of Milton and Virgil. Pemberton himself is best known as a mathematician and an associate, albeit often ignored, of Newton.
