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Original boards. Tidily but plainly rebacked, boards rubbed at edges, rear hinge neatly reinforced; small ink-blot on p.[3]. "Seventh edition" (first published 1800), with the ownership signature ("Willm Barnes") of the poet William Barnes. "O come, blest Spirit! whatsoe'er thou art, / Thou rushing warmth that hover'st round my heart, / Sweet inmate, hail! thou source of sterling joy, / That poverty itself cannot destroy, / Be thou my Muse, and faithful still to me, / Retrace the paths of wild obscurity. / No deeds of arms my humble lines rehearse; / No Alpine wonders thunder through my verse . . ." "To this Seventh Edition," writes the editor in his preface, "I would add, that, I believe, few Works of such Nature and Extent ever were so little altered from the first as this has been: and that few, indeed, have been such as require and properly admit of so little alteration . . . I understand there is a Prose Translation of The Farmer's Boy into French; and that it is translating into Italian. The first Book was early translated into Latin. This is one instance of its immediate celebrity: another will be, that, when this Edition shall be published, 26,100 Copies will have been printed in less than two years and three quarters." Born in Honington, Suffolk, in 1766, Robert Bloomfield was the son of a tailor; he worked first as a "farmer's boy" for his uncle, before moving to London to work as a cobbler. The Farmer's Boy was his first book. William Barnes, born in Bagber, Dorset, 11 months after the publication of The Farmer's Boy, was the son of a farmer, but found employment initially as a solicitor's clerk; he published his first book of poems, Orra: a Lapland tale, in 1822, achieving a wider reputation only with Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (1844). Bloomfield's influence on Barnes has often been suggested; indeed, this is not the only copy of The Farmer's Boy Barnes possessed (in 1995 Sevin Seydi advertised a copy with his ownership signature of the fifth edition, 1801). Seller Inventory # 29M100082
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