Author: HARRIS (James):
Title: Philological Inquiries.
Description: London, Printed for C. Nourse..., 1781 FIRST EDITION. 8vo, pp. [xxx], 236, [iv], [237] - 571 [572 "Advertisement," 573 - 607 Index, 608 blank], engraved portrait of Harris as frontispiece, two other engraved plates, recently recased in quarter calf, morocco label, marbled boards. A very good copy. The plate opposite p. 542 is usually a gem, as indicated in the preface, "from an Impression in Sulphur of a Gem...which...was given to Mr. Harris.... Its correspondence in most particulars with the figure of Hercules described by Nicetas...induced Mr. Harris to imagine that it might possibly be some copy or memorial of that figure...." In fact, in the above copy the engraving is by Bartolozzi of a figure of Hercules. This curious amalgam of medieval literature, literary criticism, theories of taste, personal reminiscences, and a sense of places never quite comes together as a unified and coherent work, but its suggestiveness continues to attract serious study, from Robert Marsh's account in Four Dialectical Theories of Poetry (1965) to Clive Probyn's The Sociable Humanist (1991). When the book was published, Horace Walpole wrote to William Mason that it was "paltry things indeed! He dwells on Aristotle's old hackneyed rules for the drama and the pedantry of a beginning, middle and end. Harris was one of those wiseacres whom such wiseacres as himself cried up for profound--but he was more like the scum at the top of a well." These comments must be set against the endorsement in the Monthly Review for 1782: "In the perusal of these Enquiries, the Reader's attention will seldom be fatigued with those metaphysical refinements, and that subtle erudition, with which the Author's Philosophical Arrangements were thought, even by persons well versed in antient learning and metaphysics, to abound too much. On the contrary, he will be pleased with the simple and perspicuous detail of critical speculations, which, though rarely new, are always elegant and curious, and very frequently interspersed with facts, particulars, and anecdotes, deserving to be more generally known than they are. If any persons, not deeply learned, are desirous of forming themselves to a correct relish of the best possible models in composition, and to a true judgment in matters of literary taste, there is scarcely any book that can be more properly recommended to their perusal than that now before us.... As we read, we seem to be listening to the conversation of an elegant scholar, a gentleman, a person of the greatest candour, sincerity, and worth; desirous of impressing his own liberal sentiments on the mind of others."

Keywords: philology language prose


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