Susanne Schulz-Falster Catalogue Ten

139 [GODWIN, William.] Vie et Mémoires de Marie Wollstonecraft
Godwin, Auteur de la Défense des droits de la Femme, d’une
Réponse à Edmond Burck, des Pensées sur l’Education des Filles.
Traduit de l’Anglais. Paris, Testu, et al., 1802. £1200
12mo, frontispiece portrait, pp. [iv], xii, 156; lightly browned and
spotted, due to paper quality; recent cloth-backed marbled boards.
Rare Wrst edition in French of the Wrst and standard biography of Mary
Wollstonecraft, by her lover and husband William Godwin. It was Wrst published
in English under the title Memoir of the author of A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman in 1798. Godwin’s frank account of his wife’s life shocked
contemporary readers. ‘The modern reader is likely to be moved by the life
and by Godwin’s spare, honest account of it. But at the time of violent reaction
against the French revolution, its ideology and its British sympathisers,
the frank record was a gift to conservative polemicists and it was lavishly
exploited: Wollstonecraft became a whore, whose books aimed, in the
words of the Anti-Jacobin, at the propagation of whores (Todd & Butler, p.
12–13).
CBEL II, 1250; this Wrst French edition is very rare, OCLC and RLIN list copies at
Harvard and New York Public Library; see Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler in the
preface to Pickering Masters edition of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1989, pp.
12–13).
susanne schulz-falster rare books catalogue ten
140 GONZAGA DI CASTIGLIONE, Luigi. L’Homme de Lettres,
bon Citoyen, Discours philosophique & politique de son Altesse
Monseigneur le Prince Louis Gonzaga de Castiglione: pronounce à
l’Académie des Arcades, Rome, 1776. Geneve, 1777. £450
4to, engraved frontispiece portrait, pp. cxxiv, with title vignette and
decorated initials; printed on heavy paper; contemporary full mottled
calf, spine gilt, with gilt-lettered spine label, sides with decorative gilt
Xoral tooling; a few manuscript corrections in the text; heraldic bookplate
to front paste-down and contemporary ownership inscription to
front free endpaper; possibly a large paper copy.
First edition, privately printed and rare, of the French translation of Il
Letterato Buon Cittadino, by the Italian Enlightenment author Luigi Gonzaga
di Castiglione, together with his Essay Analytique sur les Decouvertes
Capitales de l’Esprit Humain, a speech he had given at the London Royal
Society the same year, and Wnally his essay on poetry, RéXexions sur la Poesie.
Gonzaga di Castiglione (1745–1819), a maverick Enlightenment Wgure, of
noble birth and independent means but who renounced his title, was clearly
inXuenced by Rousseau and other Wgures of the European Enlightenment.
He was at home in Venice, Rome, Paris and in London, where he spoke at
the Royal Society.
Barbier II, 855 (edition limited to one hundred copies only); RLIN lists just one
copy, at Harvard.
141 GORDON, George William. A Lecture before the Boston
Young Men’s Society on the subject of Lotteries. Delivered March
12, 1833. Boston, Temperance Press, Ford & Danrell. 1833. £150
8vo, pp. 79, [1], corner torn from inner margin of p. 73 and lower
blank margin of Wnal leaf cut oV, without loss of text; uncut; occasional
light spotting; original printed wrappers, rebacked, a little dust-soiled.
First edition of a short historical lecture on lotteries, prompted by the legalisation
and subsequent privatisation of the lottery in Rhode Island.
Gordon begins with the origin of lotteries, with reference to the Roman
Congiaria, or the distribution of gifts among the Roman army and continues
with its development up to the nineteenth century. The extensive appendix
has numerous ‘case studies’ of gamblers, of the loss on lottery tickets
by insolvent debtors.
Goldsmiths’–Kress 28073.23; Sabin 27978.
Music & Ballet in Eighteenth Century Venice
142 GOUDAR, Sarah and Ange. De Venise Rémarques sur la
Musique & la Danse ou Lettres de Mr G... a Milord Pembroke.
Venise, Charles Palese, 1773.
[bound with:] GOUDAR, Sarah. Supplement aux Remarques sur la