[Rarebooks] fa: JAMES CHAPMAN - THE MUSIC or MELODY AND RHYTHMUS OF LANGUAGE 1818

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, September 27. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/pf4qolm

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain

James Chapman: The Music, or, Melody and Rhythmus of Language; In which are explained, and applied to their proper purposes, on principles new in this country, the Five Accidents of Speech…and A Musical Notation...to which are added Outlines of Gesture, and a Selection of Pieces in Verse and Prose. Edinburgh: Printed by Michael Anderson, for Macredie, Skelly, and Co. [et al], 1818. FIRST EDITION; [iii]-xxiv, 250, [2] pp. Bound without the half-title page but with the errata leaf present. [BOUND WITH:] James W. Bellamy: Jonah. The Seatonian Prize Poem for the Year 1815. London: Printed for Taylor and Hessey, 1815. First edition. [BOUND WITH:] Lord John Russell: Don Carlos; or, Persecution. A Tragedy, in Five Acts. London: Longman, Hurst, rees, Orme, and Brown, 1822. Fifth edition. Three works in one volume, 8vo (21.5), bound in early/period navy blue calf and marbled boards.

The first mentioned, by the Rev. James Chapman, is an uncommon examination of metre, cadence, and "harmony" in English verse, prose, and oratory; an attempt, in essence, to set English speech to music. Chapman, a Scottish teacher of elocution, was a student of the work of the eighteenth-century amateur philologist Joshua Steele, whose Prosodia Rationalis (1775) proposed applying to speech the symbolic method by which the modulations of musical sounds are expressed. Chapman here tries to clarify and simplify Steele's system. "The pupil [Chapman] supplies orderly arrangement, copious examples, [and] a lively style of controversy. He is amusingly contemptuous of all other systems of prosody, and amusingly confident in his own" (T.S. Ormond, English Metrists, Oxford: 1921).

Binding with some wear and bumping to the corners and extremities, rubbing to the boards and joints; intermittent toning and occasional scattered spotting to the leaves, but generally quite clean, firmly bound. Early owner's signature to the front flyleaf.