[Rarebooks] fa: WILLIAM CROWE - TREATISE ON ENGLISH VERSIFICATION 1827 - INSCRIBED to LORD ELDON

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

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

http://tinyurl.com/adcbh8k

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

William Crowe: A Treatise on English Versification. London: John Murray, 1827. Small 8vo (18.5 cm) in original boards with printed spine label; [8] + 334 pp.; with the half-title.

From the library at Encombe House, Dorset, the seat of John Scott, 1st Earl of Eldon (1751-1838), with his signature ("Eldon") and armorial bookplate on the front paste-down. INSCRIBED in a rather shaky hand on the half-title: "With the authors Respectful Compliments." Some dust-soiling to the top edge of the text block, one or two light spots to the leaves, otherwise clean and sound and firmly bound in about as well-preserved an example of original "unsophisticated" publisher's boards as we've ever seen, with just a touch of light wear to the spine and front hinge.

The author, William Crowe (1745-1829), was a poet himself as well as a clergyman and Public Orator at Oxford University. A friend of the poets Samuel Rogers and Tom Moore, he was also a close acquaintance of the radical Horne Tooke with whom he shared political sympathies. All the more surprising, then, to find his book in the library of — to say nothing of inscribed to — the arch-Tory Lord Eldon, close adviser to both George III and George IV, and one of the pre-eminent reactionaries in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English politics, successively Solicitor General, Attorney General, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and, ultimately, Lord Chancellor, holding that title, with only a year's break, for twenty-six years. Crowe was 76 years old at the time of the book's publication, which might explain the shaky inscription, as well as a mellowing of political differences.