Author: Theophrastus: (Budgell, Eustace, trans.:)
Title: The Moral Characters [...] Translated from the Greek.
Description: London: printed for Jacob Tonson, 1714. First edition.12mo., pp. [xxvi], 80, [iv], including portrait frontispiece. With two final advertisement leaves and p.79 misnumbered as p.89. Some woodcut decorations. A few faint ink smudges to frontis and title but otherwise clean. Contemporary brown calf Cambridge panelled boards, neatly rebacked with heavily gilt spine and red morocco title label, edges lightly sprinkled red, corners repaired, hinges subtly reinforced. A few slight scrapes, some patches of toning to endpapers but a very good copy. Armorial bookplate of John Cator to front paste-down, likely John Cator the landowner, timber merchant and MP (1728-1806) who commissioned the building of Beckenham Place Mansion in 1773. He was described by Fanny Burney as 'a good-natured busy sort of man' (The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay, Vol. 1.). To ffep, recent bookplate of Robert J. Hayhurst. MS inscription of J[ohn] Lydall of Uxmore in Oxfordshire, dated 1768 to title-page verso. Translated by jobbing writer and sometime Member of Parliament for Mullingar, Eustace Budgell (1687-1737). In his Preface he writes that he has not in fact 'translated from the Greek' at all but has used Bruyere's French translation as his starting point. He is surprisingly scathing about his own work: 'As for our English translation, I shall say no more of it, but that it is wholly done from the French, and as it always happens in a Translation of a Translation, is everywhere flat and spiritless'. He goes on to rather unfairly place the blame for his translations's deficiencies on Bruyere: 'It might perhaps be thought too hard if I should say Monsieur Bruyere was afraid of having Theophrastus outshine himself; yet I shall make no Scruple to affirm that the Method he has used in translating him has very much taken from the Beauty of his Author.' Budgell was a cousin of Joseph Addision and assisted him with The Spectator with some success, though he later fell on hard times. Thought vain and vindictive by many of his contemporaries, he is now mostly remembered for his death: he threw himself into the Thames, leaving a note that read 'What Cato did, and Addison approved, cannot be wrong.' ESTC T86597

Keywords: Early Printing (to c.1800, all subjects);Classics & Antiquity


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