Miscellanies by Mr Pratt in Four Volumes.

London: Printed for T. Becket..., 1785. FIRST AND ONLY COLLECTED EDITION. 4 volumes. 8vo, 183 x 114 mms., pp. [ix] x - xvi, x, 13 - 288; viii. [3] 4 - 320; [iii] - iv, 286; iv, 247 [248 adverts], with half-titles in volumes 1 and 2, engraved head-pieces for first item in each volume, contemporary calf, gilt spines; joints a little tender, front hinge volume 1 repaired, bindings generally rubbed and worrn, but a useful working set of an uncommon work Samuel Jackson Pratt (1749 – 1814) s probably best remembered as the author of Emma Corbett: or the Miseries of Civil War, (1780) and the poem Sympathy (1788), the latter being the first work to appear in these volumes, while the former item makes him the first English writer to take the American Revolution as his topic. The obituary in The Gentleman's Magazine of Pratt summarized his life in these words: "No man who ever attained public distinction was more exempt from envy; and though he may, in the vicissitudes of a life unsupported by fortune and exposed to all the casualties of a precarious subsistence, have fallen into errors, nothing of malice or ill-nature can justly be imputed to him; and as his works are all intended to promote the interests of virtue, none of these errors should be remembered in his epitaph." ESTC T85831 locates copies in BL, Bodleian, Cambridge, Longleat; Harvard (Houghton), Library Company Philadelphia, University of King's College (Nova Scotia), and Yale (3). Uncommon.