Shakespeare's Pericles and Apollonius of Tyre: A study in comparative literature

FIRST US EDITION, INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR. Large 8vo, inc. b/w frontispiece and one full-page illustration. Original green buckram, spine lettered and ruled in gilt. Edges untrimmed. Extremities bumped and worn, a little soiled. Edges toned and dusty. Inscribed in brown ink to ffep: "Thomas Arnold, With the high regard of Albert H. Smyth, January 1899". Some foxing, offsetting (from item now removed) to Contents page, occasional black marks, occasional pencil scoring. W. A. Lee, Antiquarian Bookseller (Glasgow) compliments slip laid in. Else, clean and bright. Very good A pleasing critical association copy of the American literary critic and Benjamin Franklin editor's well-received study of Shakespeare's Pericles and Apollonius of Tyre, inscribed, a year after publication, to fellow critic Thomas Arnold (the younger). Shakespeare's Pericles and Apollonius of Tyre was Smyth's MA thesis and significant enough to be read before the American Philosophical Society, in whose journal it first appeared. Reprinted in 1898, it was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic and considered a "monument of [Smyth's] learning and critical ability"; a well-networked Shakespearean, he had edited the Shakespeariana journal in the 1880s. The English literary critic and educator, Thomas Arnold ('the Younger,' 1823–1900) spent much of his career in Dublin, first at the Catholic University and, in his final role, as Professor of English Literature at University College, where he "once marked an undergraduate essay by the young James Joyce" (ODNB). Arnold's much-reprinted A Manual of English Literature (1862) became a standard textbook and he was a respected editor (for instance, of Beowulf (1876)), while "his steadfast pursuit of high aims, his gentle nature and his exquisite old-fashioned courtesy made him greatly beloved" (ibid). Arnold was the brother of poet Matthew Arnold, father of the novelist Mrs Humphrey Ward and the New Woman and journalist Ethel Arnold, and grandfather of Julian and Aldous Huxley.…