MACPHERSON

Landscape photograph, 19.5 x 14.5 cm, laid down on a piece of thin card cut from an album, 18 x 21 cm. Around sixty boys are posed in four rows in front of a grand house, with two masters to the right and two to the left, and with a fifth in the centre of the group. The group are surprisingly fat-faced, posing sulkily in jackets, with some waistcoats and tam o'shanters. Five more boys look out of a downstairs window, three from an upstairs window, and one peeks out from behind the front door.

2pp., 4to. Bifolium. Fair, on lightly-aged paper, with one minor damp stain. Dundas was the last ever British minister to be impeached. He was acquitted of corruption charges on 12 June 1806.

12mo: iv + 132 pp. Unbound. In original red printed wraps. Stapled. A poor copy of a scarce item (COPAC only lists copies at the British Library and National Library of Scotland). Dog-eared and grubby, with wraps faded and with loss to extremities and spine repaired with tape. Staples rusted and worn through prelims. Text complete and entirely legible. Five essays: 'Chatterton and the Rowley Poems', 'Macpherson's Poems of Ossian', 'The Shakspeare Forgery', 'Psalmanazar and the Formosa Imposture' and 'Bentley and the Epistles of Phalaris'.

Scottish politician (1754-1835), President of the Board of Agriculture, opponent of William Pitt the younger and editor of Ossian. The recipient James Phillips was a bookseller and stationer. On piece of paper roughly eight inches by three inches. Grubby and lightly stained. Evidence of previous mounting. Repair to slight damage to one edge with loss of two words of text. Embossed four-penny receipt stamp (slightly damaged) on reverse.