DRYDEN, John.

£2,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Fables... First editions with these Bartolozzi engravings, the only two works illustrated by Lady Diana Beauclerc, here together in handsome contemporary full morocco. Dryden's adaptations of Chaucer and Boccaccio were among the chief reasons for his perhaps surprisingly high place in the esteem of the Romantic poets, especially Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Scott, while Bürger's Leonora inspired a frenzy of competing English versions around this time. Ironically Bürger had found his ballad form not in German literature, but largely through the medium of Percy's Reliques; from Leonora it was reabsorbed into English through the Lyrical Ballads, most directly Wordsworth's "The Idiot Boy".

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