A Brief Memoir of Sir Walter Ralegh; prepared for and published in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register for April, 1862.

£12,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A magnificently extra-illustrated copy of this privately printed biography of Sir Walter Ralegh (also Raleigh, 1554-1618), Elizabethan statesman and explorer. The additionally inserted leaves nearly treble the original text and constitute a remarkable act of grangerisation. The most notable insertions are a seemingly unrecorded early tobacco trade card , titled “Sir Walter Raleigh his Man The Best Tobacco Under the Sun.” This late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth advertisement illustrates the apocryphal moment of Ralegh smoking in his library after his return from the Americas with a taste for tobacco, and his servant in the act of dousing with water his master who he thought must be on fire. There is a fine watercolour portrait attributed to the enamelist and miniaturist painter Henry Bone . There are three 16th and 17th century documents signed by Ralegh’s compatriots in the Spanish Armada defeat , including Naval commander Ferdinando Gorges, Vice-Admiral Edmund Sheffield, 1st Earl of Mulgrave, Oliver St John 3rd Baron Bletso and Thomas Sackville Baron Buckhurst. Of the 40 additional prints of Sir Walter Ralegh, we see a veritable census of his image between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of the portraits originated as frontispieces to his published works, including several editions of The Historie of the World (1614, 1677 1708), and Sir Walter Raleighs Instructions to his Sonne (1692). The extent of the collection is perhaps rivalled only by the British Museu

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