The Happy Shepherd; or, Rural Retirement; a Moral Tale. To Which is Added the History of a Coxcomical Fellow. Also the Disappointed Lovers; a Tale. Embellished with Elegant Cuts.

Gainsborough: Printed by H. Mozley, 1809 Second edition. Both the first edition and the present edition are very scarce. OCLC lists only two copies of the first edition (one at the British Library and one at the Morgan Library) and two copies of the present edition (one at UCLA and one at the Huntington Library). . Original drab boards. Eighteenmo. With engraved frontispiece and two text illustrations, which Thomas Hugo attributes to John Bewick in the 1866 descriptive catalogue The Bewick Collector (3799). Backstrip worn. Some dampstaining on lower board and some rubbing to extremities. Twentieth century bookplate on front pastedown. Some toning throughout and some light foxing, but overall a very good, clean copy of a scarce book. The present book is a collection of three salutary and cautionary tales. "The Happy Shepherd" uses the figure of a kind, humble shepherd to illustrate the virtues of a simple life lived free from "the follies of a licentious age," (p. 39). In the second tale, "The History of a Coxcomical Fellow," a young man named Tommy Changeling falls into a pattern of skipping school and disregarding his schoolwork, which eventually leads him down a path of alcoholism and crime; the tale ends when Tommy is caught and sent to Africa to be sold into slavery (p. 55). "The Disappointed Lovers" tells of Damon and Floretta, a young couple who are ultimately punished with smallpox and confinement in a convent, respectively, for their greed and hedonism.