CONDENSED CLASSICS
[SPENCE, Joseph.] Nicholas TINDAL.
A Guide to classical Learning: or, Polymetis abridged … being a Work absolutely necessary, not only for the right Understanding of the Classics, but also for forming in young Minds a true Taste of the Beauties of Poetry, Sculpture, and Painting. The fourth Edition. Illustrated with twenty-eight Prints from original Antiques, and more particularly adapted to the Use of Schools and Academies …
London, J. Dodsley, 1777.
12mo, pp. [12], xxxiv, 224, [6 (index)], with an engraved frontispiece and 12 plates, the last folding and signed ‘P. Fourdrinier’; very slight marginal blue stain to frontispiece, last quire shaken; else a handsome copy in contemporary speckled calf, red morocco lettering-piece; hinges cracked; printed booklabel of Edwin Sandys to front pastedown, dated 1778 (see below), over another Sandys family inscription.
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A Guide to classical Learning: or, Polymetis abridged … being a Work absolutely necessary, not only for the right Understanding of the Classics, but also for forming in young Minds a true Taste of the Beauties of Poetry, Sculpture, and Painting. The fourth Edition. Illustrated with twenty-eight Prints from original Antiques, and more particularly adapted to the Use of Schools and Academies …
Second illustrated edition (fourth overall) of Nicholas Tindal’s abridgement for schools of Polymetis (1747), a dialogue by the traveller, scholar, friend of Alexander Pope, and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford Joseph Spence (1699–1748), in which he explored the connections between Roman poetry and art and took aim at the pedantry of modern classical scholarship.
‘Conceived during Spence’s first visit to Italy and with much of its material collected there, Polymetis … was attacked in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon (1766) and, though new editions appeared in 1755 and 1774, and abridged versions for the use of schools were current until the 1820s, it sank fairly quickly from serious notice. However, it proved an invaluable guide to mythological images for Keats’ (ODNB).
Tindal’s Polymetis abridged turned Spence’s work into a broad guide to the classics and was first published in 1764, and then with illustrations and specifically adapted for schools in 1768. It condensed Spence’s work by ‘omitting the quotations’ and presenting the ‘real intent of the allegories and machinery’ of classical mythology – ‘and therefore … it is undoubtedly preferable to any school-book of the kind hitherto published’.
Provenance: Edwin Blundell Sandys (1765–1785), the youngest son of Col. Martin Sandys (1729–1768), of Ombersley Court, Worcestershire. His sister Mary Sandys, later Marchioness of Downshire, was the only of three siblings to survive to maturity and would inherit the family estates from her uncle.
ESTC N7457.
