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2 volumes. Large 8vo, 208 xz 126 mms., pp. xvi [xvii - xx Contents], 560; [iv], 531 [532 Errata], bound in later quarter calf, gilt spines, marbled boards, with the small book ticket of Edward John Kenney on the recto of the front free end-paper of each volume and the bookplate of Edwin Wilkins Field on the recto of the following leaves; lacks portrait, but a very good set. The biblical scholar and religious controversialist,Gilbert Wakefield (1756 - 1801) was a distinguished scholar at Warrington Academy. One of his major achievements was a new translation of the New Testament, published in 1791. He did not, however, concentrate on Biblical texts, but published, for example, a still useful edition of Alexander Pope's translation of Homer in 1796, and as ODNB records, "inally, his massive three-volume edition of Lucretius (1796 7), published at his own expense and dedicated to Charles James Fox, established Wakefield as one of the two leading British scholars of his time, the other being Richard Porson. Unlike Porson, however, Wakefield was excessively fond of emendation, always worked in great haste, and rarely took time for revision. Thus, although his critical remarks can show considerable brilliance and an unusual awareness of continental advances in scholarship (Wakefield seems to have been among the first Englishmen to promulgate F. A. Wolf's conclusions about Homer), his work is riddled with errors and was largely dismissed by the British Academy within a few years of his death." An earlier work, Memoirs of the Life of Gilbert Wakefield, published in 1792, to which Joseph Priestley, Anna Barbauld, and Mary Hays contributed, provides much of the material for this 1804 work, edited by John Towill Rutt and Arnold Wainewright. Seller Inventory # 9819
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