Title: LETTERS, ON THE SPIRIT OF PATRIOTISM: ON THE IDEA OF A PATRIOT KING; AND ON THE STATE OF PARITIES, AT THE ACCESSION OF KING GEORGE THE FIRST
Author: Viscount Henry St. John Bolingbroke
Publisher: Printed for A. Millar, Opposite to Catharine-Street
Year: 1749Binding Style: Hardcover (Leather)
Pagination: 251 pages Illustrated: No
Book Details + Condition: Very scarce first edition, first printing from 1749. The full leather boards and
binding are solid and tight save for minor shelfwear. The pages are very crisp, clean and free of interior markings. Bolingbroke's treatise, consisting of three separate philosophical essays penned in the late 1730s, calling for an end to political partisanship and for a balancing of the British constitution by way of a king acting on purely patriotic grounds. Please see below for more information on Bolingbroke and his legacy.
Henry St John Bolingbroke (1678-1751) was an English politician, government official and political philosopher. He was a leader of the Tories, and supported the Church of England politically despite his anti-religious views and opposition to theology. Bolingbroke was a major influence on Voltaire, and on the American patriots John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Adams said that he had read all of Bolingbroke's works at least five times; indeed, Bolingbroke's works were widely read in the American colonies, where they helped provide the foundation for the emerging nation's devotion to republicanism. His vision of history as cycles of birth, growth, decline and death of a republic was influential in the colonies; as was his contention on liberty: that one is "free not from the law, but by the law."
