SUBSCRIBER’S COPY OF AN UNRECORDED ISSUE
TACITUS, Publius Cornelius; N. S. SMITH, translator.
Dissertation on the Manners of the Germans, and the Life of Agricola … translated from Brotier’s Edition … with copious Notes and a Map of ancient Germany.
London, George and William Budd Whittaker, 1821.
8vo in 4s, pp. xiv, [vii], [1 (blank)], 210, with a folding engraved map of Germania by Sidney Hall after Robert de Vaugondy; a few very minor stains; else a very good copy, uncut in publisher’s drab boards, part-printed subscriber’s label to front board with ‘Jn:o Stratford Collins’ in manuscript, paper label to spine (‘Smith’s Tacitus | 12s. ext. bds.’); joints starting but firm, a few dampstains to covers; ownership inscription of John Stratford Collins to front pastedown.
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Dissertation on the Manners of the Germans, and the Life of Agricola … translated from Brotier’s Edition … with copious Notes and a Map of ancient Germany.
First edition, a seemingly unrecorded issue of this bilingual edition of Tacitus’ Germania and Agricola, a subscription copy uncut in publisher’s boards.
Translated by a Bristol schoolmaster from Brotier’s celebrated edition of 1771, this version provides English renderings of the two works alongside the Latin original in smaller type and copious footnotes. There was a political, and patriotic, dimension to the edition: Britain’s institutions, the roots of which are seen in Tacitus, were ‘laid too deep in our habits for the puny hand of a despot suddenly to destroy’. They would be harder yet to extinguish if the present works did not lie ‘hid in a dead language’ and in a style ‘known, by classical men, to be concise even to perplexity’. ‘The nationality of the French youth is proverbial; whilst apathy equally characterizes ours. … It was this consideration that primarily operated on the Translator’s mind, and which has finally induced him to lay his translation before the Public’ (preface).
The edition was published on subscription, with the original subscribers including a notably large number of surgeons as well as the Physician Extraordinary to the Duke of Clarence. The present subscription copy appears to be of an unrecorded issue, containing a seven-page list of additional subscribers not found in other known copies. Among these additional subscribers are Lord John Russell and Edward Jenner as well as one John Stratford Collins, the owner of our copy. A solicitor practising in Ross-on-Wye, Collins was apparently responsible for the town’s Gazebo Tower, a mock-Gothic folly and landmark.
Other issues are rare: OCLC and Library Hub locate only four copies of the edition in North America (Phillips Exeter, St Mary of the Lake, Sutro, Yale) and two in the UK (BL, Bristol University), none of which seems to have the seven pages of additional subscribers found in ours.
