The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, Hero and Leander, Lycus the Centaur and Other Poems (Hans Sauer Bookplate)

From the book collection of Hans Sauer. viii, 226pp. Full brown speckled leather boards with gilt decoration, six panels and gilded titles on spine. Interior, gilded dentelles. Marbled endpapers. Handsome volume with light edge wear on boards. Bookplates on front endpapers, indicating the volume was once part of the library of Hans Sauer. Sauer, a well-known book collector, was a South African born medical doctor, traveller, businessman and adventurer, linked with the creation of Rhodesia. Partial death notice of Thomas Hood (1799-1845) pasted in opposite title page. The son of a bookseller, Hood was the sometime sub-editor of ‘The London Magazine’ and an acquaintance of Lamb, Hazlitt and DeQuincey. He edited several literary periodicals as well as his own ‘Hood’s Magazine’. He wrote this volume and several others that were well respected although he is best remembered for his humourist efforts. The Cambridge History of English Literature records that this work ‘may be thought to need no praise after Lamb’s; yet it may not be impertinent, and it is certainly not rash, to pronounce it, after nearly a hundred years, the most charming poem of some size and pretension which has missed its due need of general appreciation’. 8vo.