Author: HOWE (John):
Title: The Vanity of this Mortal Life: or, of Man Considered only in his Present Mortal state.
Description: London: Printed by A. Maxwell, for Sa: Gellibrand..., 1672. FIRST AND ONLY EDITION. 12mo, 140 x 70 mms., pp. [xx], 158 [159 blank 160 docket title, 161 - 166 blank (with loss of corners), including imprimatur leaf, with three blank leaves before imprimatur leaf, contemporary panelled shepskin; top and base of spine chipped, joints rubbed; no paste-down end-papers, but a good to very good copy, with two later 18th century owners' names on recto of imprimatur leaf, and some brief notes in a contemporary hand on the verso of the last leaf. The Presbyterian minister John Howe (1630 - 1705) came under the influence of the Cambridge Platonists as a student at Christ's College, Cambridge, but he was not himself a Platonist. Later, Howe was admitted as a Bible clerk at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he graduated BA on 18 January 1650 and attained an MA in 1652. and was ordained as a Presbyterian in 1652. This is just one of more than 30 works that Howe published. "Howe was an extremely prolific writer, publishing, in addition to those mentioned above, some twenty-eight other works. Almost 200 further lectures and sermons were published posthumously and, after Calamy's edition of his collected works of 1724, several more multi-volume editions were published in the nineteenth century. Howe's writings have a consistent seriousness of tone; there are passages of sustained irony in his polemic but he is never frivolous. At once capable of relentless logic and deep feeling, he reveals an other-worldly fervour, and the abstraction of his writings is only rarely relieved by the metaphors, illustrations, and biblical examples which mark the writings of the more popular puritan divines" (ODNB),

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