Hudibras, a Poem. by Samuel Butler with Notes, selected from Grey and Other Authors: to which is prefixed, A Life of the Author and Preliminary Discourse on the Civil War. A New Edition, embellished with Engravings

New edition, the first edition with 12 hand-coloured plates by J. Clarke. "It may be mentioned also that the present volumes are embellished with twelve beautiful and spirited engravings from original designs by Clarke, and, in point of topographical excellence, it is presumed they will be found to yield, in neatness and perspicuity, to no edition hitherto published." (Advertisement) John Heaviside Clark (c. 1771-1863) was a Scottish landscape painter and engraver, known as "Waterloo Clark" because of the sketches he made on the field immediately after the battle. He was a regular exhibitor Royal Academy between 1801 and 1832. Samuel Butler's Hudibras, a satiric poem on the English Civil War written in Chaucerian couplets, was first published in English from 1663 to 1678. Voltaire notes that "there is one English Poem, the title whereof is Hudibras; it is Don Quixote; it is our Satyre Menippee blended together: I never met with so much wit in one single book as this" (Letters Concerning the English Nation). 8vo (224 × 136 mm), 2 volumes, pp. lxxiii, [1], 444, with 7 coloured plates by Clark; 494, with 5 coloured plates by Clark; early twentieth-century red crushed morocco by Riviere & Son, lettered in gilt on spine, rich gilt turn-ins, top edge gilt. From the Astors' library at Cliveden, with their bookplate. In 1890, William Waldorf Astor (1848–1919) inherited, it is thought, $100,000,000 (making him the second richest man in America), and moved to England where, three years later, he bought Cliveden House from the Duke of Westminster. In 1906, he gave the house as a wedding present to his newly married son, Waldorf (1879–1952), and his wife, 'the beautiful, brilliant, and outspoken young American divorcee' (Oxford DNB), Nancy (18791964), who famously went on to become the first woman MP to sit in the House of Commons in 1919. With a manuscript page tipped into volume two quoting the description of Hudibras from Curiosities of Literature by Isaac D'Israeli. Tooley 141.…