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[BOSWELL, James the Younger (1778-1822)] -- POPE, Walter. The Life of the Right Reverend Father in God Seth, Lord Salisbury, and Chancellor of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. London: Printed for William Keblewhite, 1697.
8°, endpapers restored. Publisher’s advertisements, with errata slip, pp.194-195. Eighteenth-century mottled calf (upper cover detached and present). Provenance: White Kennett (1660-1728), Bishop of Peterborough (his bookplate, signature at foot of title-page, and marginalia); James Boswell the Younger (1778-1822) (his signature preserved from original endpapers and pasted atop Kennett’s bookplate on front pastedown); sold Bibliotheca Boswelliana, Sotheby's, 24 May - 2 June 1825, lot 2239.
FIRST EDITION AND BOSWELL'S SON'S COPY of this biography of Seth Ward (1617-1689), who was Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. He challenged the ideas of Kepler and disputed Hobbes’s political philosophy as expressed in the latter’s Leviathan. Kennett’s note on rear flyleaf relates an anecdote about Ward from his Oxford days, in which the professor was “so intent in his study upon some mathematical problem that he was perfectly absorbed in it and continued in a deep hunting meditation for two days together taking no refreshment but an egg which his servant pour’d down w’out his perceiving of it. And from this sketch of his brain the Relator imputed the disorder in his head that came afterward upon him.” Wing P2911.
8°, endpapers restored. Publisher’s advertisements, with errata slip, pp.194-195. Eighteenth-century mottled calf (upper cover detached and present). Provenance: White Kennett (1660-1728), Bishop of Peterborough (his bookplate, signature at foot of title-page, and marginalia); James Boswell the Younger (1778-1822) (his signature preserved from original endpapers and pasted atop Kennett’s bookplate on front pastedown); sold Bibliotheca Boswelliana, Sotheby's, 24 May - 2 June 1825, lot 2239.
FIRST EDITION AND BOSWELL'S SON'S COPY of this biography of Seth Ward (1617-1689), who was Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. He challenged the ideas of Kepler and disputed Hobbes’s political philosophy as expressed in the latter’s Leviathan. Kennett’s note on rear flyleaf relates an anecdote about Ward from his Oxford days, in which the professor was “so intent in his study upon some mathematical problem that he was perfectly absorbed in it and continued in a deep hunting meditation for two days together taking no refreshment but an egg which his servant pour’d down w’out his perceiving of it. And from this sketch of his brain the Relator imputed the disorder in his head that came afterward upon him.” Wing P2911.
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Please note this book is signed by James Boswell the Younger, son of Johnson's biographer.