Olympia-2015

same year, and then Chief Justice of Common Pleas in 1675; this was followed byhis appointment as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in 1682, which gave himauthority over the chancery, its court, and the passing of all royal charters andcommissions.This set was formerly in the library of the distinguished lawyer and politician, JohnScott, Earl of Eldon, Member of Parliament and Privy Counsellor, who held theoffices of Solicitor-General (1788-1793) and Attorney-General (1793-1799), beforebeing appointed Lord Chancellor in 1801.85. PALMA, Luis Gonzalez. The Silence of the Gaze. Verona, Peliti Associati,1998.4to, pp. [90]; colour plates; black cloth, gilt, pictorial dustjacket; fine in a finejacket. £150First English edition of Il Silencio dei Maya (1998), signed by Palma on thetitle-page.‘THE FIRST EXAMPLE OF FRENCH PROSE AS WE KNOW IT TODAY’ (PMM)86. [PASCAL, Blaise]. Les provinciales ou les lettres par Louis de Montalte, aun provincial de ses amis, & aux RR. PP. Jesuites: sur le sujet de la morale; &de la politique de ces peres. Cologne, Pierre de la Vallée [i.e. Amsterdam,Elzeviers], 1657.12mo, pp. [xxiv], 398, 111, [1 blank]; the odd mark, residue of wax seal to rearendpaper; an attractive, unsophisticated copy in contemporary vellum, yapp edges,ink titling to spine; contemporary ownership inscription (G. Vanvianen) to secondfree endpaper with a partially crossed out and faded note to the head of the page;pencil manuscript ownership inscription and bibliographical note to first freeendpaper initialled by Cosmo Gordon. £2500First 12mo edition, first Elzevier edition, first issue, and the first edition tohave continuous pagination; published in the same year as the first completeedition, in quarto, printed in Paris. Elzevier’s quickly established itself as thestandard edition.‘The Lettres Provinciales, as they are called, are . . . perfectly finished in form,varied in style, and on a subject of universal importance . . . [Pascal] will always bechiefly remembered as a moralist, more especially as the great apologist forJansenism, the seventeenth-century French ascetic movement of reform inside theRoman Catholic Church . . . At the end of 1655, the movement had been muchunder attack from the Jesuits, and Pascal was persuaded to write a rejoinder . . .[his] counter-attack took the form of a brilliant exposure of the casuistical methodsof argument employed by the Jesuits (PMM).