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Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney; with Remarks, by Miss Porter …

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First edition, uncommon, of a collection of aphorisms and observations drawn from Sidney’s prose works, edited and with additional commentary by the novelist Jane Porter (1775–1850).

Sidney had been favoured childhood reading for the Porter family, and her runaway success Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) had been dedicated to Sir Sidney Smith ‘under the Hope, that as Sir Philip Sidney did not disdain to write a Romance, Sir Sidney Smith will not refuse to read one’. The Aphorisms was intended to be followed by editions of Sidney’s Poems and Arcadia, and a Life, none of which were realised. It was a family project, and her brother the artist and diplomat Sir Robert Ker Porter (1777–1842) provided the frontispieces; the work was dedicated to Gustavus IV Adolphus of Sweden, who had knighted Robert Porter in 1806.

Seeing in Sidney ‘an example of how happy and how admirable virtue can render a man.’ Porter culled from his works a series of political and moral aphorisms organised by subject (‘Man’, ‘Freedom’, ‘Cowardice’, ‘Prudence’, ‘Friendship’, ‘Woman’, etc.), interspersed with Remarks in which she drew parallels with classical history and contemporary politics and society, and quoted Hume, Locke, Burns, and others. Tyranny and mob rule are particular obsessions, as reflective of her age as Sidney’s.

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