£500
FIRST BENTLEY EDITION, 4to, pp. [xxviii], 310, [4], 460 + additional engraved title-page. Twentieth-century pebbled brown roan, boards bordered with a gilt rule, spine divided by raised bands, second compartment gilt-lettered direct, edges gilt. Some toning and spotting. A bit rubbed, front hinge cracking. Pencilled ownership inscription of Thomas Braun to flyleaf.
The first edition of Bentley's magisterial and important edition of Horace, preceding the Dutch reprints of 1713 and 1728. Rash - but brilliant - and 'unlike any edition of a Latin author ever before given to the world' (Monk), the volume contains substantial notes that were the result of nearly seven years of work, and the text contains hundreds of conjectured emendations, many of them wrong but many others supported by subsequent manuscript discoveries. Bentley's outstanding achievement in textual scholarship, it cemented his reputation as an arrogant genius of ancient languages, called by Housman 'the greatest scholar that England or perhaps Europe ever bred'.
