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Fine unread condition blue linen boards with gold spine lettering contained in a near fine condition color photographic dust jacket. Includes Illustrations List Page and Preliminary Page Quotes by Horace and Elphinston. Edited by W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. Light rubbing at the upper and lower jacket spine front edge and a few upper page edge darkened spots (see photographs). All pages are in fine unmarked condition and the spine/binding is in exceedingly tight and square unread condition (see photographs). "My other works," Samuel Johnson is reputed to have said, "are wine and water; but my Rambler is pure wine." Posterity has come to accept this verdict; yet, surprisingly enough, until now the most widely used edition of the Rambler has been the wholly unauthoritative one of 1825. In furnishing an accurate, carefully annotated text of the 208 numbers of the Rambler, periodical essays which appeared twice a week between March 20, 1750 and March 14, 1752, the present edition thus meets a long-felt need. A persceptive Introduction by W.J. Bate suggestively probes the moral vision that pervades most of the essays; and since the Rambler is by far the most heavily revised of Johnson's writings, the many thousands of variant readings provide a rare and fascinating glimpse of Johnson at the task of polishing his style. Here, then, for the first time meticulously edited, is the quintessential Samuel Johnson." - from the inner front jacket flap. "In 1750, still living in poverty, and already at work on his dictionary, Johnson began anonymously to write the essays which appeared in The Rambler, a twopenny sheet which appeared twice weekly for two years, whether Johson was well or ill, idle or busy. They are at once moving, amusing, and didactic: many betray the haste with which they were composed, but mosts are remarkable for their quality, their clarity, their weight. Written in Johnson's rather abstract and Latinate style, they are concerned with practical rather than with theoretical morality. They concern themselves not with casual whims but with underlying causes and motivations: they attempt to show the reader how to cultivate a proper state of mind, how to employ his energies and time efficiently. Frequently they embody Johnson's comments on his own experience of universal human anxieties and frustrations: The Rambler is a sage and a moralist, but he is also constitutionally indolent. N. 134, for example, (composed by Johnson extempore while the copy-boy waited) is a brilliant study of the tendencies toward idleness and procrastination which Johnson struggled against all of his life, tendencies which all of us, to one degree or another, share with him.Taken together the essays embody Johnson's belief that the author as moralist has a duty to improve the world: they have little to do with contemporary political, social, or literary events, but the Rambler's comments on his society and on the human condition are characteristically ponderous, shrewd, ironic, compassionate, wise, and enormously perceptive, (and, from a psychological point of view, uncannily anticipatory of Freud." - from victoriaweb dot org.
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