Works of Oliver Goldsmith, The

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900. The Library Edition of the Works of Oliver Goldsmith

GOLDSMITH, Oliver. The Works of Oliver Goldsmith. Edited by Peter Cunningham, F.S.A. Illustrated. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900.

Library Edition. Twelve large octavo volumes (8 3/4 x 5 3/4 inches; 221 x 147 mm.), including The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, by John Forster (in four volumes). Photogravure frontispieces and plates from photographs and from drawings and paintings by Arthur I. Keller, Albert Sterner, Alfred Fredericks, F. Luis Mora, W.P. Snyder, Charles Broughton, and others. With an introduction by Austin Dobson. Title-pages and half-titles printed in red and black.

Publisher's (stamp-signed on the verso of the front free endpaper: Bound by Harper & Brothers) three-quarter dark green morocco, ruled in gilt, over marbled boards. Spines in four compartments with three raised bands, gilt-lettered in two compartments, the remaining two compartments decoratively tooled in gilt in a floral design with red morocco onlays. Top edge gilt, others uncut. Spines uniformly sunned to brown. A near fine set.

Oliver Goldsmith (1731-1774), Irish-born English poet, playwright, and novelist. "His literary fame began with The Traveller (1764), a didactic poem surveying national modes of happiness, which was praised by Samuel Johnson and other members of his famous Literary Club. His major works include An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), a prose essay attributing the decline of polite learning to the inferiority of poets; The Bee (1759), a periodical containing perhaps his most famous tales, ‘Reverie at the Boar's Head Tavern' (1760) and ‘Asem, An Eastern Tale' (1759); The Citizen of the World [1762], a satiric epistolary novel in imitation of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721); The Vicar of Wakefield [1766], a novel; The Deserted Village [1770], a poem; and The Good Natur'd Man [1768] and She Stoops to Conquer [1773], comedies. A beloved member of Johnson's circle, he was noted for his comic verbal faux-pas, though it seems that Goldsmith buffooned purposely on occasion without his friends ever suspecting it. At the end of his life he retorted to their raillery in a series of brilliant caricatures, The Retaliation (1774)" (Benét's Reader's Encyclopedia).