MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART.

Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1862. 10 volumes. Early Printing of the complete work. A set with fine provenance, bearing the bookplates of Henry Lee, of the historically important New England family. Illustrated with engraved frontispieces and vignette title-pages. Small 8vo, handsomely bound in dark-green three-quarter morocco over marbled paper covered boards, the spines with raised bands gilt stopped and with double gilt fillet rules to the panels, two compartments lettered in gilt, all edges marbled, marbled end-leaves. A fine and handsome set, especially well preserved and in very pleasing condition. WITH FINE PROVENANCE, THE COLLECTION BELONGING TO HENRY LEE OF BOSTON WITH HIS BOOKPLATE. The Lee family was engaged in early mercantile capitalism in America and was an important figure in its development. The family showed remarkable powers of adaptation to successive forms of capitalism, mercantile, industrial, and financial; and, as opportunity served, they were to do more than their share in promoting the cultural welfare of America.
Of the broad pictures that emerge, is the commercial family compact, the set of families that intermarried and did business with the world, using one another in special positions of trust. The records and documents produced within the pages of the two volumes show nothing more was involved than the confidence that kinsmen feel in one another. And the lines within the letters and documents indicate that ability was not a guaranteed accompaniment of honour and exertion.
The Lees exported and imported and wholesaled their goods in America. They had ships at sea and were active in the Calcutta trade and the East Indian affairs. It is Henry Lee's bookplate that is affixed here.
Lockhart was a Scottish writer and editor. He is best known as the author of the seminal, and much-admired, multi-volume biography of his father-in-law Sir Walter Scott: Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. This biography included the publishing of a great number of Scott's letters. The Life of Scott has been called, after Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, the most admirable biography in the English language.