BURNS, Robert.

£375 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Works and Correspondence A volume of Burns's writings bound and decorated with Celtic imagery as a graduation gift for an Eton student. Included are the poet's letters to Agnes Maclehose (Clarinda), that Sir Walter Scott called, "the most extraordinary mixture of sense and nonsense, and of love human and divine, that was ever exposed to the eye of the world." (Hecht).This copy is from the library of Robert J. Hayhurst (1929-2016), with his bookplate on the front pastedown. Hayhurst inherited and improved a successful group of chemists, John Hayhurst & Son, in Nelson, Lancashire, and was an avid collector of naval history and literature in contemporary bindings. Though unmarked by the artist, a previous bookseller's conjectural note on the front free endpaper suggests this copy was at one point in the library of the painter E. A. Hornel, a Scottish Modernist part of the collective known as The Glasgow Boys.

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