Author: RAMSAY (Andrew Michael, "The Chevalier"):
Title: The Travels of Cyrus. To which is annexed, a Discourse upon the Theology and Mythology Of the Ancients. The Fifth Edition much enlarged.
Description: London: Printed by James Bettenham: And sold by C. Hitch.., 1736 12mo, 160 x 84 mms. pp. [ii] - xxx, 274, 84, 19th-century Riviere-style binding in half blue calf, spine gilt in compartments with Masonic images (including the sun with emanating rays and the square with compasses), red morocco label, marbled boards; spine slightly faded but a very good copy with the Masonic bookplate of the "Supreme Council" on the front pastedown endpaper, ownership signature and date, "Frederick Ekins / 1790" on recto of second front free endpaper, with notes in pencil on Ramsay and this book in an early hand ("The Chevalier Ramsay was Tutor to the Pretender", and "Bishop Beverley said this is the finest written Book in the English Language"), and on the verso of the leaf before the title a stamped coat of arms above the name "John Glas Sandeman" in blackletter script. Although Ramsay was born in Ayr, Scotland, in 1686, he spent most of his life in France; an ardent Jacobite, he was befriended by the Stuart pretender. This book proved to be one of the most successful books published in the 18th century and was translated into German, Italian, Spanish and Greek before the end of the century. Ramsay's intellectual debts can be traced to Fenelon but primarily to Ralph Cudworth's True Intellectual System of the Universe. John Laird, in Hume's Philosophy of Human Nature (1732) says that Hume's threefold division of reason "into (rational) `knowledge', (casual or experimental `proofs' and (conjectural) `probabilities'" derives from Ramsay, and adds that Andrew Baxter in his Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul cites the relevant passage from Ramsay's work. Hume met Ramsay in 1737 when he was in Paris. Ramsay's Travels of Cyrus was a best-selling book of the eighteenth century. This lifetime edition from 1736, however, is distinctly rare, the online ESTC finding only BL and Oxbridge for institutional libraries in the United Kingdom, plus two copies under the care of the National Trust, so presumably at country seats. Outside the UK, the ESTC finds only three copies anywhere: Cornell, Duke, and the University of Houston.

Keywords: philosophy binding Scottish Enlightenment prose


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