The Age of Lewis XIV
First Edition of Voltaire's Great History
Voltaire, [François Marie Arouet] de. THE AGE OF LEWIS XIV. Translated From the French (London: for R. Dodsley, 1752) 2 volumes. First editions in English. Illustrated with engraved frontispiece in each volume, engraved head and tail pieces throughout. 8vo, bound in an attractive full speckled calf of the period with gilt ruled borders on all covers, spines with gilt ruled bands and gilt tooled devices in panels, each with two contrasting morocco labels, lettered in gilt viii, 436; 292, 90, [index]. A very fine set, internally crisp and fresh, the contemporary bindings very handsome and in an excellent state of preservation.
RARE FIRST EDITION IN EXEMPLARY CONDITION. Satirist, novelist, historian, poet, dramatist, polemicist, moralist, critic, and correspondent, Voltaire was the universal genius of the Enlightenment. Welcomed in the free-thinking circles of Parisian society, he was committed to the Bastille for his satires in 1717-18, and again exiled to England in 1726-9. The remainder of his life was divided between long periods of retreat in the provinces (first in Champagne with Mme du Chatelet, finally at Ferney near Geneva) and brief returns to metropolitan centers (Paris, Versailles, Berlin). His literary principles were fundamentally neoclassical. His history SIECLE DE LOUIS XIV (1751) disregards providence as an explanatory principle seeking instead evidence of social and moral progress. [Drabble].
A work superior to his SIECLE DE LOUIS XV, this history contains "a great miscellany of interesting matter, treated by a man of great acuteness and unsurpassed power of writing, who also had access to much important private information" (Encyc. Brit.).
An uncommon find in contemporary bindings and in such pleasing condition. Britannica; Drabble; BMC. |
