THE WORKS AND REST OF THE CREATION: containing I. An essay on the universe. Designed to promote a familiar, pleasing, and religious knowledge of the earth and heavenly bodies. II. Sunday thoughts, adapted to various parts of the Christian Sabbath; and its different duties, exercises, and employments.

12mo, engraved portrait frontispiece and pp. xiv, viii, [ii], 240; a little dampstained at the end, else a fine copy, in contemporary unlettered plain calf, gilt fillets on covers and spine. First and apparently only edition. Moses Browne (1704-87) received early patronage from Robert Viscount Molesworth, but the nobleman's death in 1725 deprived him of the advancement he might have expected, and it was only at about this time that he took holy orders, and was given the living of Olney, in Buckinghamshire. He was often absent, especially when he acquired further livings, but his curate at Olney, from about 1764 onwards, was John Newton, whose friend William Cowper moved to the parish; Browne must have known them both, and cannot have been unaware of the publication of their Olney Hymns in 1779. As his biographer in ODNB remarks, Browne was a 'deservedly popular minor poet', and one whose sensibility contributed to romantic naturalism, as Southey himself remarked. Foxon p. 93.