MIDDLETON (Conyers): - The Miscellaneous Works Of the late Reverend and Learned Conyers Middleton, D. D. Principal Library o the University of Cambridge. In Five Volumes. The Second Edition.

London, Printed for R. Manby... and H. S. Cox..., 1755. 5 volumes. 8vo, 200 x 118 mms., pp. [x], [iii] v - cxix [cxx blank], [123] - 427 [428 blank]; [iv], xxix [xxx blank] [ - 31] - 456; [iv], 468; [iv], 408; [iv], 372 [373 - 468 Index], engraved portrait of Middleton as frontispiece (off-setting on title-page), contemporary calf, red leather labels; tops and bases of spines slightly chipped, front joints slightly creased, but a good set. The autogrpah and date "Tho: Wickins/ 1788" appear on the recto of the front free end-paper in each volume. Middleton (1683 - 1850) was unusual among scholars, philosophers, and many men of letters, being, as Horace Walpole related "immoderately fond of music, and was himself a performer on the violin," an accomplishment that elicited Richard Bentley's immoderate remark that "a fiddler" rather than a scholar. He and Bently crossed scholarly swords on various occasions. His impressive life of Cicero was published in 1741, but it was his A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers (1749) that caused his reputation to suffer among his ecclesiastical colleagues. He was, as Brian Young remarks, "a thinker who was more than usually aware of the ambiguities at the core of his own heterodox assualt on the status of theological (and historical) orthodoxy in eighteenth century England" (Conyers Middleton: The Historical Consequences of Heterodoxy [2012]).

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