Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. In Three Volumes. By the Right Honourable Anthony, Early of Shaftesbury. The Fourth Edition. MDCCXXVII (1727).
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Shaftesbury's Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times is a collection of treatises on interconnected themes in moral philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and politics. It was immensely influential on eighteenth-century British taste and manners, literature, and thought, and also on the Continental Enlightenment. The author was a Whig, a Stoic, and a theist, whose commitment to political liberty and civic virtue shaped all of his other concerns, from the role of the arts in a free state to the nature of the beautiful and the good.
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Provenance:
Armorial bookplate of John Seale with the motto "In Caelo Sales" (In Heaven, Salvation).
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Size: 133 x 202 mm (approx.)
Condition:
[frontis, t.p., 1ff. (contents), volume one title, iii-iv, 364pp.]; [volume two title, pp.3-443]; [volume three title, half title, 391pp., 54pp. (index)]
Full brown calf with gilt volume numbers to spines. Bindings secure, lightly rubbed and scuffed, some leather peeled, with a very slight shelf lean, remaining upright. All boards attached with sight wear to joints and hinges, some starting. Some shelf and edge wear, small dent to the edge of the front board of volume one. Spotted page edges dulled, with top edges darkened as often. Bookplate attached to front pastedown in each volume. Text blocks extremely clean with very sporadic foxing.Some light damp staining to the first and last few leaves in volume three. Small worm holing to the first few leaves in volume two, until pp.174. Rear pastedown in volume one lightly detached at the edge.
