DAILOGUES OF THE DEAD BY LORD GEORGE LYTTELTON 1760 THIRD EDITION, TREE CALF
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[LYTTELTON, GEORGE, LORD]. Dialogues of the Dead. London: Printed for W. Sandby, MDCCLX. [1760].
Third edition. Leather-bound. Hardcover. Octavo (210 x 130 x 25 mm). Pp. xii, 320. Bound in handsome contemporary tree-calf, smooth spine with morocco title-label and gilt bands, red-dyed page edges, title-page device, head- and tail-pieces, decorative initials, shoulder notes. Provenance: H. M. Hunter's armorial bookplate to front pastedown; James Allan's signature to head of title-page. Condition: VERY GOOD. Binding tight and secure, very slight rubbing to extremities. Interior very well-preserved with just a touch of light browning. Neatly inked contemporary signature to title. An excellent example.
Notes: Third edition, published shortly after the first and second editions. The popular Dialogues of the Dead by Lord George Lyttelton (sometimes spelled Lyttleton) (1709-1773). Like the first and second editions of the same year, this edition contains 28 dialogues, 25 by Lyttelton and three by his friend Elizabeth Montagu. Lyttelton's interlocutors include Addison and Swift, Plato and Fenelon, Cortez and William Penn, Boileau and Pope, Locke and Bayle, and Lucian and Rabelais. In number 28, Elizabeth Montague has Plutarch, Charon and a contemporary London bookseller discussing reading tastes of the day. Lyttelton was a respected and well-connected politician and man of letters. His Dialogues were the quintessential Augustan imaginary conversations; they were widely imitated, and almost no work with the title Dialogue(s) of the Dead was published in England in the decades following Lyttelton's without acknowledging him as a model and inspiration. See the ODNB. The eleven items listed in the errata of the second edition have been corrected in this third edition. ESTC T78376; NCBEL II, 556.