[Rarebooks] fa: JAMES HAMMOND - LOVE ELEGIES - 1st/1743

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with other 17th & 18th-Century English works,  
auctions ending Sunday, April 3. More 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?_trksid=p4340.l2562

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

[James Hammond:] Love Elegies. Written in the Year 1732. London:  
Printed for G. Hawkins, at Milton’s Head between the Temple-Gates,  
Fleetstreet: and sold by T. Cooper, at the Globe in Pater-Noster Row,  
MDCCXLIII [1743 or 1742]. FIRST EDITION. Folio (32 x 21 cm) in modern  
stiff marbled wraps; iv + 20 pp.; woodcut decorations. Foxon H22; ESTC  
T113660.

A nice fresh copy of the uncommon first edition, with both the poet  
and the author of the preface anonymous. As later editions made clear,  
the preface is by none other than Lord Chesterfield (Philip Dormer  
Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield). James Hammond (1710-1742), M.P.  
for Truro, friend of Chesterfield, Lyttleton and Pitt, purportedly  
wrote these elegies while suffering from an unrequited passion for a  
Miss Dashwood. Samuel Johnson, in his Lives of the English Poets, cast  
doubt on the poet's sincerity: "he that describes himself as a  
shepherd, and his Naera or Delia as a shepherdess, and talks of goats  
and lambs, feels no passion; he that courts his mistress with Roman  
imagery deserves to lose her..."). Nevertheless, Hammond is  
considered, along with Shenstone and Gray, as one of the progenitors  
of the 18th-century English elegy, and indeed the last important  
practitioner of the love elegy. Modern readers also admire him for the  
surprisingly erotic undertones of his verse,