[Rarebooks] fa: LORD PALMERSTON'S COPY of Percy's SONG OF SOLOMON - 1764

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, Jan. 24. Details and images can be  
found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://shop.ebay.com/arch_in_la/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=&_trksid=p4340

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A., CA USA

[Thomas Percy:] The Song of Solomon, Newly Translated from the  
Original Hebrew: With a Commentary and Annotations. London: Printed  
for R. and J. Dodsley, in Pall-Mall, 1764. FIRST EDITION. Small 8vo  
(18 x 11.5 cm) in full period polished calf, gilt-stamped morocco  
spine label; xxxv + [1] + 103 + [1] pp.; with the half-title. ESTC  
T147470.
An externally handsome, internally superb copy. Modest wear to the  
edges of the binding, exterior hinges cracked but both boards are  
secure; touch of light soiling to the half-title page, light toning to  
the leaves, else contents are Fine: clean and crisp, firmly bound.  
Front paste-down with the engraved armorial bookplate of Lord  
Palmerston, Prime Minister 1855-58 and 1859-65.

THOMAS PERCY (1729-1811), rector of Wilby and later Bishop of Dromore,  
was a poet and antiquary who counted Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Thomas  
Warton and William Shenstone among his friends. A year after his Song  
of Solomon, he published his most enduring contribution to literature,  
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, the first of the great ballad  
collections, which almost single-handedly sparked the revival of the  
ballad form in English poetry and influenced the early Romantic  
movement, setting the stage for Robert Burns, Wordsworth and  
Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, etc. HENRY JOHN TEMPLE, 3rd VISCOUNT  
PALMERSTON (1784-1865), Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister for much  
of the mid-Nineteenth Century, pursued an interventionist, if not  
downright belligerent, foreign policy, overseeing the Crimean War and  
the Second Opium War, among other fracases. He was a principal bête  
noire of Charles Dickens, who satirized him ruthlessly and repeatedly  
in his Household Words. Queen Victoria didn't cotton to him much,  
either ("[he] behaved to me well, but I never liked him"), perhaps  
because he had famously tried to seduce one of her ladies in waiting  
while staying as Victoria's guest at Windsor Castle.