“AN ELEGANT PIECE OF BIOGRAPHY”

(DE MEDICI, Lorenzo) ROSCOE, William. The Life of Lorenzo De’ Medici, Called the Magnificent. London: A. Stahan, T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies… J. Edwards, 1796. Two volumes in one. Large quarto, contemporary full brown tree calf rebacked and recornered, original elaborately gilt-decorated spine laid down, red morocco spine label, marbled endpapers and edges.

Second edition, revised and expanded, issued in London the same year as the Liverpool first edition of Roscoe’s massive biography of Lorenzo de’ Medici, with engraved frontispiece portrait and 15 engraved illustrations, a handsome wide-margined copy in contemporary tree calf.

“The life of Lorenzo de’ Medici is in a double sense the history of Italy in his time. He was not only the arbiter of political events; but also in his own brilliant and diverse nature he was himself the type of multiform brilliance of that extraordinary age” (Carpenter, Lorenzo de’Medici, 1). This major 18th-century history of the Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici won British historian William Roscoe immediate praise. “The idea of writing the Life of Lorenzo, his principal work, had occurred to Roscoe at an early age, and in 1790 his friend William Clarke consulted on his behalf many of the manuscripts and books in the libraries of Florence” (DNB). Clarke was given access to “the various literary repositories of Florence. To the credit of the Grand Duke, his palaces, galleries, museums and libraries, were thrown open… Even the public archives and state papers, lodged in the Palazzo Vecchio” (Roscoe, Henry, Life of William Roscoe I:148-9). “In 1793 Roscoe began to print the Lorenzo at his own expense, at the press of John MacCreery, the Liverpool printer” (DNB). “Life of Lorenzo was at length published, in the month of February 1796 by Mr. Edwards, of Pall Mall… Soon after its appearance Roscoe received a liberal offer (1200l.) for the copyright, from Messrs. Cadell and Davies, of the Strand, which he immediately accepted. A second edition [this copy] was speedily put to press” (Roscoe, 158).

“An elegant piece of biography” (Lowndes, 2128), Life of Lorenzo was praised by Henry Fuseli for skillfully uniting the “general history of the times, and the political system of the most memorable country in Europe, with the characters of the most celebrated men, and the rise and progress of science and arts” (Analytical Review). Thomas Mathias credited Roscoe with producing “a work of unquestionable genius, and of uncommon merit. It adds the name of Roscoe to the very first rank of English classical historians.” To Horace Walpole, Life of Lorenzo possessed “Grecian simplicity” and he proclaimed Roscoe “the best of our historians” (in Alibone, 1867). Second edition, revised and expanded, published the same year as the Liverpool first edition. With engraved frontispiece, engraved vignettes for each title page, and 13 engraved illustrations: chapter headings, one in-text, and at each volume’s final text leaf. With half titles, extensive appendix, and index.

Interior generally fresh with light scattered foxing, inner hinges expertly reinforced. A very handsome volume.