VIRGIL; John MARTYN ( translator ). Georgicarum libri quatior. The Georgicks of Virgil, with an English Translation and Notes.

VIRGIL; John MARTYN ( translator ). Georgicarum libri quatior. The Georgicks of Virgil, with an English Translation and Notes.Virgil for Botanists with Early Colour Printing VIRGIL; John MARTYN (translator). Georgicarum libri quatior. The Georgicks of Virgil, with an English Translation and Notes. London: Richard Reily for the editor. 1741. 4to. Contemporary English panelled calf, gilt morocco lettering piece to spine, board edges roll tooled in gilt, edges speckled red; pp. xxii, 403, [1 (errata)], 4, [1 (blank)], [10 (index)], with 13 copper engraved plates (5 of which

Virgil for Botanists – with Early Colour Printing

VIRGIL; John MARTYN (translator). Georgicarum libri quatior. The Georgicks of Virgil, with an English Translation and Notes. London: Richard Reily for the editor. 1741.

4to. Contemporary English panelled calf, gilt morocco lettering-piece to spine, board-edges roll-tooled in gilt, edges speckled red; pp. xxii, 403, [1 (errata)], 4, [1 (blank)], [10 (index)], with 13 copper-engraved plates (5 of which printed in colour and finished by hand, the others with contemporary hand-colouring); woodcut headpieces and initials, extensive commentary in two columns; headcap wanting, a few scuffs and abrasions to boards, top-edge slightly dusty; a few marks; else a handsome copy; a few contemporary manuscript corrections, contemporary ownership inscription ‘P. Foley’ to tipped-in blank facing plate after p. 352, eighteenth-century bookplate of John Stackhouse, with three annotations in his hand, nineteenth-century armorial bookplate of E.W. Stackhouse (see below).

First edition of this translation of Virgil’s Georgics, a four-part agricultural didactic poem, by the lapsed Cambridge professor of botany John Martyn, illustrated with early examples of colour-printed botanical engravings, our copy from the library of notable botanist and classicist John Stackhouse and passed by descent to his son, E.W. Stackhouse, inheritor of much of Narcissus Luttrell’s library.

Botanist and correspondent of Linnaeus John Martyn (1699–1768) was the founder of the earliest formally constituted botanical society in Britain, acting as secretary and with Johann Jacob Dillenius as president. In 1727, he was recommended by Hans Sloane (listed as a subscriber on p. xxii) and William Sherard to repeat his successful lectures for the society to medical students at Cambridge, and in the same year began working as an apothecary and was elected to the Royal Society. In 1730 he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge as a fellow-commoner, and was elected professor of botany in 1733. ‘After three years the lengthy absences from his London practice told afresh and … turned into the stereotype of an eighteenth-century absentee professor and had no more to do with Cambridge for almost thirty years … Always a keen Latinist, Martyn devoted his later years to producing an edition of Virgil, with a translation and natural history notes. Of this, he published the Georgicks in 1741 and the Bucolicks in 1749, but of the Aeneids he left only fragmentary material, which was seen into print after his death’ (ODNB). The present work is dedicated to Richard Mead (FRS, FRCP), physician to George II and keen bibliophile, who had encouraged Martyn in his translation and lent him two important manuscripts from his library.

Five of the handsome botanical plates have been printed in colour and finished by hand, an early example of the technique likely carried out by Elisha Kirkall and Jacob van Huysum, who had produced the plates for Martyn’s Historia plantarum rariorum (1728–37), which contained ‘some of the earliest examples of colour-printing from a single metal plate. These plates were executed by Kirkall in a mixture of line-engraving … etching, and mezzotinting’, an expensive and elaborate technique (Henrey, quoted in Walters, p. 32)). The colour-printed engravings depict a citron tree, an olive tree, honeywort (or cerinthe), Hyacinthus poeticus, and Aster atticus.

Provenance:

1. Owned and annotated by the Cornish botanist and classical scholar John Stackhouse (c. 1742–1819). He resigned his fellowship from Exeter College, Oxford in 1763 upon inheriting the Pendarves estate, where he settled after three years of travel. Italy was evidently one of his destinations: his annotations describe botanical anomalies (‘I saw in a Garden in Italy an Olive branch, a Vine, and a Fig, all growing on an Orange Tree’); and recounts the geography of ‘ modern Italy, where every little town and village is situated on a rocky Eminence. I.S.’. He also critiques an ‘absurdly translated’ phrase of Martyn’s. He was particularly interested in seaweed and, ‘inspired by his classical background, those plants referred to by Theophrastus’ (ODNB).

2. Edward William Stackhouse (1775–1853), second son of John Stackhouse, whose bookplate has been adhered over his father’s, was MP for West Cornwall from 1832 until his death and was the maternal cousin of Luttrell Wynne, great-nephew of Narcissus Luttrell. Wynne inherited Luttrell’s library, some of which was donated to All Souls or sold; the rest passed to Stackhouse, who changed his name to surname to Wynne; 132 of Luttrell’s books from the Pendarves library were sold at Sotheby’s, 4–6 May 1936.

ESTC T67044 (calling for 11 plates only); Not in Pritzel (cf. p. 184). See Walters, ‘The Martyns and the Linnaean Tradition’, in The Shaping of Cambridge Botany (1981), pp. 30–46.

SKU: 2123412