THE ART OF CORRESPONDENCE, OR MODELS OF LETTERS IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH, divided into four parts: I. Trade and family affairs. II. Education. III. Friendship, love, courtship and marriage. IV. Miscellaneous letters on all sorts of subjects.

FIRST EDITION. Two vols., 12mo, pp. 455, [1] blank; [iv], 383, [1] blank; parallel text in English and French; bound in contemporary, possibly original, mottled calf, spines with green labels, lettered in gilt.


Scarce first edition of The Art of Correspondence, with models including Chesterfield, Laurence Sterne, Eliza Draper, Pope, Saint Simon and Colardeau, together with examples of commercial correspondence etc., with the author's aim that 'this collection will meet with a kind reception, not only from tradesmen, bankers, and other people of business, in general, but also from the teachers of the English tongue, and those who make it the object of their study. Might our endeavour be attended with success, our satisfaction as to the attempt, would be much the greater, that it is the first of this kind ever offered to the public in France.'

Coming as it did in the midst of the war between Britain and France one wonders if the publisher and author had in view the idea that France would inevitably conquer Britain and that merchants, teachers and others would need a working relationship with the English language. That the same publisher issued parallel editions of Thomson's Seasons at the same time, and a little later a similar parallel text to ours on the Spanish and French language, seems to confirm this hypothesis. Of the author, little is known apart from his being a teacher of language active around the turn of the nineteenth century in Paris.

OCLC records one copy only, at Tilburg.