Description
Edinburgh: William Creech, 1807-1809. First edition, 2 volumes, 4to, inscribed to John Ramsay Esq. of Ochertyre from the author, portrait frontispiece, 2 plates with handwriting specimens, 2 half-titles, contemporary calf gilt with blue and olive green morocco labels to spines, some slight browning
Footnote
Note: PRESENTATION COPY to John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, inscribed on the volume i title verso To John Ramsay Esqr. of Ochtertyre/ as a Testimony of sincere friendship/ and Esteem/ from The Author. The title verso of the Supplement (1809), bound at the end of volume i, is also inscribed, and at the front of the volume, there is a leaf containing a manuscript verse eulogy in Latin (eight lines) addressed to Ramsay, signed AFT. Ramsay made major contributions to the work, and this copy was handsomely bound for presentation.
Ramsay might have written Kames's biography himself: Kames was his closest friend and neighbour, and features prominently in his memoirs of his contemporaries, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, published in 1888. He is indentified in the preface as the "very learned and ingenious friend, - an old and intimate acquaintance of Lord Kames; [who provided] a variety of curious matter, illustrative of his Lordship's character, the characters of his cotemporaries [sic], and the manners of his age, which that gentleman had studied with the most discriminating sagacity." Ramsay is warmly acknowledged elsewhere in the work, for example at pages 42 and 58 of volume i.
Tytler was another close friend, and his biography includes several letters from Hume, Franklin, Thomas Reid, Alexander Gerard, Josiah Tucker, and others; it is also a major source for the life of Monboddo. The important Supplement arose due to the availability of the memoirs of Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, and some manuscript collections of James Boswell, who at one time was preparing materials for a life of Kames.
Alexander Fraser Tytler, one of Edinburgh's illuminati, wrote on a variety of miscellaneous subjects, including a supplementary volume to Lord Kames's Dictionary of Decisions. In 1780 he was appointed joint professor of universal history at the university and in 1786 sole professor. Lord Cockburn notes that it was as professor of history that he was chiefly distinguished, but posterity remembers him best for his writings, and for his association with Kames, Monboddo, Dugald Stewart, John Gregory, Henry Mackenzie, Burns and others.
The work is a necessary component of any Enlightenment collection and this is an unsurpassable association copy.