The Works in Verse and Prose. SHENSTONE (William).

The Works in Verse and Prose. Most of which were never before printed. In Two Volumes, with Decorations. [Vol.III: Containing Letters to particular Friends, from the Year 1739 to 1763].

Vol.1 with engraved frontispiece portrait, engraved vignettes on the title, at the head of pp.13, 105, 201, 243 and at the foot of p.345; vol.2 with engraved frontispiece, vignette on the title, at the head of p.3 and foot of p.371, and folding map of the Leasowes (with short tear).
First Edition. Three volumes. 8vo. [214 x 131 x 115 mm]. [1]f, viii, 345, [7] pp; [3]ff, 392pp; xvi, 399, [1] pp. Contemporary bindings of calf, the covers of vols 1 and 2 stained to a "cat's-paw" pattern, the spines divided into six panels with raised bands flanked by gilt fillets, lettered in the second on red goatskin labels and numbered in the third on a darkened background (now faded), vol. 3 with plain covers but a gilt roll around the edges and different decoration to the label, plain endleaves, red sprinkled edges. (Minor cracking to upper joint of vol.1 and lower joint of vol.3, patches of insect activity on upper cover of vol.3, lightly rubbed).
London: printed for R. and J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall, 1764-1769.

Vols 1 and 2 were published in 1764, and vol 3 in 1769, and hence the bindings are not uniform. All three bear the bookplate of James Ogilvy, either third or fourth Earl of Seafield and the ink shelfmarks of his Cullen House library in Moray. The contents of the house were sold off in 1975 with many of the books having already gone to Sir Tobias Rodgers some years earlier.

William Shenstone is best remembered for The School-Mistress, but his output included miscellaneous verse, elegies, odes, songs and ballads, along with prose (Essays on Men, Manners, and Things) and letters. He devoted much of his energies into turning his estate, The Leasowes in Shropshire, into a landscape garden. Samuel Johnson noted that he did this "with such judgement and such fancy as made his little domain the envy of the great and admiration of the skilful: a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers". He died in 1763 and the Dodsleys regarded him as amongst the best of our English writers and worthy of this grand edition. Burns agreed, calling him "that celebrated poet whose devine elegies do honour to our language, our nation, and our species".

Stock no. ebc7899