Bleinheim, First Edition (4 results)

Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. 1st Edition. 1941 Harrap Guild Books Paperback 1st Edition 1st Impression. Very good+ clean tight binding with classic cover design as shown. Bound in sections.

[2], 22pp. Folio. Foxed & browned. Disbound. ESTC T4586; Foxon P226. First edition variant with 'Army, Death.', p.8, line 12. Foxon P226. It was written on the occasion of the Duke of Marlborough's victory, and commissioned by Robert Harley as a Tory counter to Addison's The Campaign (1704). Written in imitation of Milton, and using Addison's poem as a template, its double derivativeness was to later prove an embarrassment to Philips, who in an anecdote related by Harley, pleaded that 'Mr Secretary Harley made me write it'. (Ref: Houston, Alan. A Nation Transformed: England After the Restoration. CUP, 2001.).

8vo in fours, pp. [iv], 33; 16; [ii], [43]-48; 48; with an engraved frontispiece portrait (as a bust on a monument); the pagination occasionally shaved at head, and some leaves a little foxed, else a good copy; in early panelled calf, rebacked. First collected edition. John Philips (1676-1709) was educated at Winchester and Christ Church, Oxford. As a schoolboy he developed an affinity for the poetry of Milton which remained with him during the whole of his brief but influential literary career. His imitations of Milton attracted great attention, both from critics and imitators. 'A poet who could commend both Charles I and John Milton, both Bolingbroke and Marlborough, would find many friends and make few enemies. Their praise suggests that, whatever his Stuart sympathies, his deepest political instincts, like Pope's, were for reconciliation Philips did not aim at literary fame or fortune: he apparently wrote for his own pleasure' (ODNB). This first attempt at a collected edition of his verse is in fact a nonce collection, assembled by Curll from the sheets of his own publication, George Sewell's Life and Character of Mr. John Philips, with the preliminaries cancelled (but retaining the Latin ode to Bolingbroke), along with piracies by Henry Hills of his two most famous poems, with the original title-pages dated 1709 (Foxon P234 and P240). Complete copies are very uncommon: ESTC lists only twelve examples. The medallion portrait in this copy is not mentioned by ESTC; it has the appearance of a proof before letters. Provenance: Early inscription on the half-title: 'Ex dono Johannes Whyte de Lexlep [sic] Dublin 2d Feb 1719/20'. Below this is an ownership inscription dated 1913, noting the acquisition of this copy from Bertram Dobell; 19th-century armorial bookplate of George Stirling Home Drummond of Blair-Drummond and Ardoch. Foxon p. 570.

Folio, pp. [iv], 6; upper portion of last page a bit dusty, else a fine copy; disbound. First edition of Lyttelton's first publication, published when he was 19, and about to set off on the customary grand tour on the Continent. The poem, in blank verse and on the Duke of Marlborough and his palace, is dedicated to Lady Diana Spencer (1710-35), the Duke's granddaughter through his daughter Anne, who had married the Earl of Sunderland; Lady Diana married the Duke of Bedford in 1731, but her only child was stillborn. Samuel Johnson regarded this poem as a mediocre performance: 'His blank verse in Blenheim has neither much force nor much elegance'. Nor was the subject new, as Aubin points out: 'Blenheim, already celebrated by Harrison and Hoffman, was sung by Lord Lyttelton in a flowery style. the classical dictionary is ransacked for parallels. Like other haunters of these shades, Lyttelton pays his respects to 'Rosamonda, hapless Fair' [i.e. Rosamund Clifford, mistress of Henry II]; and he exalts the late Duke whose super-life-size statue on its enormous pillar dominates the impeccable estate.' Foxon L330; Aubin, Topographical Poetry, p. 127; Horn, Marlborough: a Survey, 540 (with a long summary).