Album of engravings, cameos, and poems,

Bookseller Notes

A very neatly assembled scrapbook from the Regency Period. It has echoes of a teenager's friendship book, with a Romantic sensibility conferred by sentimental poems such as 'Forever Thine', 'The Bride', and Montgomery's 'The Crucifixion'. Most poems are transcribed in full, where others lend couplets as captions to engravings; a favourite for the latter is Thomas Moore's narrative poem The Loves of the Angels (1823). Indeed, apart from the odd interjection of quotations from the likes of Burns, Congreve and Swift, this is a distinctly contemporary product. Adding to its pathos, and perhaps predictably, are two pages entitled 'Byron's Latest Verses / Missolonghi January 22 1824', penned just before the poet's death in April of that year. Byron is joined by another early nineteenth-century pin-up, the future George IV as Prince of Wales, looking rather dashing surrounded by coloured cameos.