THOUGHTS ON THE LATE TRANSACTIONS RESPECTING FALKLAND'S ISLANDS.

London: T. Cadell, 1771. First Edition, second state with K2 cancelled, but complete with matching catchwords. First edition. [4] + 75pp. 8vo. Half red straight-grained morocco, red coated cloth. 2 raised bands. Gilt lettering and decoration on spine. Early 20th century binding. With half title. Woodcut title ornament. Armorial bookplate of J.T. Williamson on front endpaper. Miniscule burn mark on the letter "T" on the title page. A few tiny, almost calligraphic annotations, possibly in a 19th century hand, else a very clean and crisp copy. Fine. The sale of the first issue of Johnson's attack on Lord Chatham (William Pitt the Elder) and George Grenville as "war-mongers" was stopped by Lord North who required a cancel leaf in unsold copies to eliminate the slur on Grenville. Johnson ridiculed the idea of going to war for "the empty sound of an ancient title to a Magellanick rock." Fleeman, p. 1180-81. The uncancelled passage in this first issue, later suppressed at the behest of the government of Lord North, contains the celebrated sarcasm of George Grenville (who died in 1770). The second issue has the anodyne reading "he had powers not universally possessed; and if he sometimes erred he was likewise sometimes right." "The administration had finally arrived at a peaceful agreement with Spain, in which the Falkland Islands were to be regarded as Spanish yet administered by the British. But some of the opposition was clamoring for war. It is against this unthinking clamor that Johnson turns the best of [his] polemical passages." — W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (1978).…