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First edition, including the first appearance of the author's "Dissertation on the Language and Characters of the Chinese", the ideas of which fed into his monumental Reliques of Ancient English Poetry published three years later. "The origins and development of British Romantic Sinology in Percy's Chinese writings is closely associated with the emergence of the literary aesthetic we know as Romanticism" (Kitson, p. 32). In his essay, Percy argues that "Chinese culture is dialogically related to English culture, as he understands it in the Reliques, by virtue of the formality and antiquity of its social and political forms and the barbarity and backwardness of its literature, in which oral speech and written language are radically disjunct. In the Miscellaneous Pieces, Percy develops a theory of the Chinese language, to paraphrase Min, divided between an underdeveloped orality and an overdeveloped script, a problem rooted in the pictorial, hieroglyphic nature of Chinese signs, which is indicative of primitive societies but inadequate to meet the needs of more advanced, civilized societies. the Reliques consciously aims to transcend the gap between oral and written language that Percy highlights in Chinese culture" (Clingham, p. 209). Besides his own contribution, Percy's anthology includes William Chambers's "On the Art of Laying out Gardens Among the Chinese" (first published in 1757), as well as translations of writings originally published in French and German. Provenance: the front pastedowns each with a near-contemporary armorial bookplate faintly embossed with "Dunrobin Castle", the family seat of Clan Sutherland. The arms include the coronet of a marquis, a letter "e", and two occurrences of the letter "s" both mirrored, suggesting that this copy belonged to Elizabeth Leveson-Gower (1765-1839), 19th Countess of Sutherland and, from 1803, Marchioness of Stafford. "Like many aristocratic women of the period, Elizabeth Sutherland's interests were not confined to her estates. She accompanied her husband to Paris in May 1790 on his appointment as ambassador, at the height of the French Revolution, and wrote interesting descriptions of the political turbulence. She sent clothing to the imprisoned Marie Antoinette, an act which was reputed to be the last gesture of kindness shown to the doomed queen" (ODNB). Cordier (2nd edition), p. 53; Löwendahl 525; Lust 99. Greg Clingham, "Johnson and China: Culture, Commerce, and the Dream of the Orient in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England", in Kevin L. Cope (ed.), 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, volume 24 (2019), pp. 178-242; Peter J. Kitson, Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange 1760 1840, 2013. 2 vols, small octavo (160 x 97 mm). Engraved frontispiece, Chinese characters on title pages. Near-contemporary green mottled calf, smooth spines divided by gilt rules, black labels, boards with gilt frames and roundels in corners, board edges rolled in gilt, turn-ins tooled with gilt rules and roundels, marbled endpapers. edges sprinkled blue. Spines lightly sunned, a little wear and bumping at spine ends and tips, endpapers with couple of areas of skinning, contents lightly toned with a little spotting. A very good copy indeed.
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