Essays on Song-Writing: With a Collection of such English Songs as a most Eminent for Poetical Merit. The Second Edition, with Additions and Corrections

Warrington: Printed by William Eyres, for Joseph Johnson..., 1774. 8vo, 184 x 198 mms., pp. xix [xx blank], 286, contemporary calf, small gilt border on covers, spine ornately gilt to a floral motif, red leather label; binding darkened and a bit rubbed, top and base of spine chipped, slight cracking of upper and lower joints, corners a bit worn. This work is usually attributed to John Aikin (1747 - 1822), a physician and author of various political and biographical works. The genesis of this book came, Aikin says in his Preface, when he and various friends lamented the absence of a good collection of the excellent songs in which song-writing was taken seriously as an art form: "The chief sources of good songs, are the miscellany poems and plays from the time of Charles the second to the conclusion of Queen Ann's reign." He was working in London in 1769-70 and moved to Warrington in 1771, and he might have made the acquaintance of the radical publisher, Johnson, during his brief sojourn in London. His political leanings were liberal, and Johnson published his An Address to the Dissidents of England on their Late Defeat (1790). The 1772 first edition was reviewed in at least four journals in the same year, and the author of the notice in The Critical Review was enthusiastic: "The whole discovers the author to be possessed of a large share of critical knowledge and good taste.... The songs in this collection cannot fail of affording pleasure to those readers who have a taste for the beauties of poetical composition; and the ingenious observations in the Essays add greatly to the value of the work.l"