First edition of Sheridan’s impressive speech on the army estimates, in support of funding precautions against Buonaparte’s aggression – ‘the crisis in which we are placed … so big with tremendous importance, so pregnant with mighty difficulties, so full of apprehensions and dangers ….’ ‘I have heard instances, Sir, where mounting wooden guns upon a fort has produced the same security as if there had been real ones. But unluckily in this instance for us, by our constitutional form of proceeding, our whole force must be known: we cannot pass upon an enemy wooden guns, and an army at Brentford. If we vote no force, an enemy will know we have none ….’

This was one of the most important speeches of Sheridan’s parliamentary career. Lord Limerick reported that his talents and patriotism were complimented by every side of the House, although his own party’s leader, C. J. Fox, while acknowledging that he will doubtless ‘be right in the end’, still worried that the speech had given concern to his friends and satisfaction to his enemies.

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EXTRA-ILUSTRATED CHANSONS DELLOYE, H.-L. (editor).

Chants et chansons populaires de la France [– notices par M. du Mersan], première [– deuxième; – troisiéme] série.

First edition of a finely illustrated, serially published collection of French music, broad-margined, extra-illustrated, and accompanied by the later fourth series. Formed of four series of twenty-eight issues, sold individually at sixty centimes from February 1842, the Chants et chansons populaires are considered by Carteret to be an ‘admirable publication, printed on papier vélin fort, deservedly highly esteemed as one of the most beautiful of the nineteenth century, which can be compared to the handsome illustrated books of the eighteenth century’.

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BEARDÉ DE L’ABBAYE.

Essays in agriculture: or, a variety of useful hints, for its improvement, with respect to air, water, earth, heat and cold; as an attempt to ascertain their influence on vegetation. Together with reflections on animals, plants, seeds, slips and manures …

First and only edition in English. Little is known of Beardé; born at the beginning of the eighteenth century, he won the 1766 prize offered by the Agricultural Society of Saint Petersburg with his Essay in answer to the question ‘Est-il plus avantageux à un état que le paysan possède en propre du terrain, ou qu’il n’ait que des biens meubles? Et jusqu’où doit s’étendre cette propriété pour l’avantage de l’État?’ He criticised the physiocrats in some of his works, and was in turn attacked by Baudeau in the Ephémérides du Citoyen. He died in 1771. The first edition appeared in French in 1768.

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