2 vols., 4to, pp. [iv], 582, [10, final pages of index]; [iv], 509, [5, initial pages of index] + engraved frontispiece portrait in first volume. Contemporary speckled calf. Some foxing, mainly to initial gatherings and frontispiece. Recently rebacked, new spines gilt, red morocco labels, some repairs to corners. Binder’s tickets to front pastedowns reading ‘Restored by Blair Jeary, Burghley House, Stamford’.
The sixth edition of Hume's essays, the first to appear as two quarto volumes and the first to be illustrated with a portrait of the author. The initial unauthorised collection was in four small duodecimos, and when Hume took charge of the work and renamed and re-ordered the contents he produced a single-volume quarto of 1758, another four-volume 12mo set in 1760, and then a two-volume octavo edition in 1764. This last formed the textual basis of several further editions in the 1760s, all except this one also in octavo. But Millar, the main publisher, thought the larger quarto format more appropriate to align with Hume's other publications: a letter of 1767 from Hume to William Strahan survives in which he forwards a quarto volume of Olivet's Cicero to demonstrate the size intended for this edition of the Essays and Treatises, 'as a Forerunner to the like Edition of my History'.
The portrait frontispiece, engraved by Ravenet after John Donaldson, reproduces an image that Hume similarly considered most appropriate - in another letter to Millar he calls the painting 'the likest that has been done for me, as well as the best Likeness'.
The index pages in this copy have been split between the first and second volume, presumably a mistake made by the binder in the 18th century.
