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Two volumes in 1, small 8vo, 156 x 93 mms., pp. [viii], 172 [173 Errat, 174 blank]; [vi], 172 [173 Postscript], 174 blank, separate title-page and engraved portrait frontispiece for each volume ("Della Crusca" and "Anna Matilda," respectively, contemporary calf, recently rebacked, with gilt spine and red morocco label; corners worn. Inscribed on rear free end-paper: "Charles Arliss/ Gainsbro/ May 21 A. D. [sic] 1821." The journalist and playwright Edward Topham (1751 - 1820) published an account of his six months in Scotland, mainly in Edinburgh, in 1776, Letters from Edinburgh, 1774 and 1775, a very useful source of information and insight about Edinburgh when it was a "hot-bed of genius." The Poetry of the World and The British Album were the first publications to bring before the public the writings of a group of English authors living in Florence and styling themselves the Della Cruscans. Della Crusca has been identified as the poet Robert Merry (1755 - 1798). On the whole, the Della Cruscan poets have not been received with wild adulation: Walter Scott called them "a set of coxcombs who have humbugged the world long enough," while Hazlitt and Macaulay thought them less than dilettantes. George Saintsbury had even better lines in invective, charging them with "pretentiousness and imbecility not easy to parallel.," styling them and their followers as people who "drank themselves drunk at the heady tap of Sturm-und-Drang romanticism, blending it with French sentimentality and Italian trifling, so as to produce almost inconceivable balderdash." You have been warned. Three editions were published in 1790, including one in Dublin. See W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, The English Della Cruscans and their time, 1783-1828 (1967). Seller Inventory # 7872
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