Letters and Correspondence, Public and Private of The Right Honourable Henry St John, Lord Visc. Bolingbroke;

Additional information

4 vols complete, 1st ed, VG. In contemporary half calf over worn blue marbled boards, corners and edges bumped and worn. Spines, worn, titles in gilt, joints repaired, edges worn with some loss. Internally, text block edges sprinkled blue, small bookseller label to fpds, lacks half titles. Vol 1, armorial bookplate to fpd (John Wright, Kelvedon Hall), [5], (viii-xiv), [1] errata, [1], [1], 2-510 pp, watermarked 1798 to tp. Vol 2, bookplate to fpd, [2], [1], 2-628 pp. Vol 3, [2], [1], 2-611 pp. Vol 4, [2], [1], 2-646 pp. Some light offsetting, occasional light spotting and edge browning, hinges strengthened, pencil notes to eps and some marginal pencil highlighting. A good set of an important and interesting title. (210*128 mm). (ESTC T152908. Allibone 215. Brunet 1076). Title continues: During the time he was Secretary of State to Queen Anne; with State Papers, Explanatory notes, and a translation of the Foreign Letters, &c. Bolingbroke, politician, diplomatist, and author whose reputation as a philosopher was never substantial and, after the publication of his essays, it has never recovered. For nearly 200 years he was also widely condemned as an unprincipled political charlatan. Only in the late twentieth century did historians at last recognize him as a substantial, if flawed, political figure in Anne's reign and as a brilliant, if eventually unsuccessful, political writer in the age of Walpole. Although he supported a losing political cause, his career tells us much about the vicissitudes of the tory party and the divisions over fundamental issues of principle that cast them, a potential majority of the political nation, into the political wilderness after 1714. Bolingbroke's writings tell us much about the ideological divisions that persisted under the first two Hanoverian monarchs. See ODNB.