Miscellaneous Manuscripts, Palaeography, and Biblioclasm – T...

Hammer

£60

Miscellaneous Manuscripts, Palaeography, and Biblioclasm – Twickenham pre-Alexander Pope – a Charles II ink MS single-page letter, addressed to The Reverend Dr Richard Meggott (Meggot; c. 1633 -1692), Dean of Winchester and Canon of Windsor (as royal chaplain in ordinary), “at his house in Windsor Castle”, the foot of the epistle is damaged and partly missing (eliding the writer’s signature), an aide or clerk is the presumed author, it concerns the value of the parsonage of Twittenham (i.e. Twickenham, Middlesex), about which the good Dean had clearly been interested; on the reckoning of the (then) recent past, when it had been assessed jointly with Isleworth, Twickenham had returned the lesser amount at £80, going on to explain that there were 637 acres of tithable land returning 3d per acre; a note on the reverse gives the date 1682, 29cm x 19cm, (1); a 15th Medieval hand-scrivened vellum land inspeximus fragment, including a red stylized marginal manicule and keywords underlined in red, 13cm x 18.5cm, (1); a George III ink MS on paper poem, ‘The Difference between Today and Tomorrow’, comprising ten heroic couplets gloomily comparing the delights of living (‘today’) with the obloquy of death (‘tomorrow’), dated at the foot ‘wrote in the year 1770/by me ε’ϑ’on’ [sic], 13.5cm x 15.7cm, (1); a set of 15 English anachronistic woodcuts, taken from a book, [n.d., 17th/18th century], each tableau numbered and titled in Roman and Gothic Black Letter, mounted on one sheet, (1); others, 19 Swiss wood-engravings, 1787, mounted on one sheet, (1), [5]