Lot 289
[R.H. ROSE] [AMERICAN IMPRINTS] Sketches in Verse, 1810

Estimate: $400 - $500

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About this Lot
Description
[Joseph DENNIE (editor)]. - 'R.H.R.' [ Robert H. ROSE] [AMERICAN IMPRINTS] [POETRY]. Sketches in Verse, 1810 [Virginia Bookplate]

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'R. H. R.'[Dr. Robert Hutchinson ROSE (1776-1842)]. Sketches in Verse [edited by Joseph Dennie]. Philadelphia: Printed for C. & A. Conrad & Co. by Smith & Maxwell, 1810 (c 1819). 23 x 15 cm. (Early American imprints. Second series; no. 21241).[iii-]viii, [9-]184 pp.
Includes an engraved title page, 2 engraved plates, and a tailpiece. Engravings are assumed by some to have been added to a later issue, c 1819. Deluxe issue or a re-issue - either way the book is fairly rare.

Plates engraved by George Murray
and William Satchwell Laney, after Thomas Sully illustrations - early examples of this American painter’s published work.
Period tree calf leather binding, morocco spine label, gilt lettering, and design; joints splitting, spine ends and corners rubbed; repairs to hinges; text has moderate foxing; illustrations have browned and transferred to facing page. Introduction signed R.H.R., i.e. Robert H. Rose.

Includes the long poem Lyrical Ballad, an early parody of William Wordsworth.

Bookplate: Maurice H. Garland, Lynchburg, a lawyer from a prominent Virginia family.

A description of the illustrations quoted from the British Library - which accepts the 1810 date:

  1. The frontispiece with a satyr seducing a nymph in a wooded glen, a lyre at their side, a Latin motto 'Mecum... Quaere Modos Leviore Plectro.' below
  2. A man with folded arms and a sad expression, dressed in mock 16th-century clothes, looking towards a personification of Despair, crouched amidst dark clouds and tearing at its hair, dancing women beyond
  3. A man in Eastern dress of a coat over his robe with a turban on his head and two swords tucked into his sash looking pensively down at a ruin in the grass at his feet, a landscape with palm trees beyond
  4. An overgrown stone inscribed 'Finis'

NB: Laid-in is a 1904 handwritten letter from David Hutcheson, Library of Congress, to Dr. Robert Fletcher, Washington D.C., concerning the authorship of this book.