First English Edition: (xii), 291 pages, bookplate on the front free endpaper, half brown mottled calf with marbled paper sides, a very good copy.
Mendelssohn (Sydney) South African Bibliography, volume 2, page 263, 'This work was written by the author of the well-known romance " Paul and Virginia," and is an account of the travels and voyages of Saint-Pierre from 1768 to 1771. In the latter part of 1771 the author visited Cape Town (on his homeward voyage), where he was entertained by " Monsieur Tolbac " (Governor Tulbagh), whom he describes as an able and affable man of eighty years of age. There is a somewhat pleasing account of the Cape Colony and its inhabitants, who are represented as being " a pensive set of people, who chuse rather to feel — than to converse or to argue. Perhaps want of subject is the cause of their taciturnity." Reference is made to the paucity of the European population, and it is observed that " Holland perhaps . . . fears the aggrandising of this colony, preferable in every respect to the mother country."'
(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jacques-Henri-Bernardin-de-Saint-Pierre)'Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (born Jan. 19, 1737, Le Havre, France—died Jan. 21, 1814, Éragny) was a French writer who is best remembered for Paul et Virginie, a short novel about innocent love. Bernardin’s army service as an engineer on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean provided him with material for Voyage à l’Île de France (1773), with which he opened his literary career. The work brought him to the attention of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose friendship did much to mold the views expressed in Bernardin’s Études de la nature (1784; “Studies of Nature”). To the third edition of Études (1788) he appended Paul et Virginie, the story of two island children whose love for each other, begun in their infancy, thrives in an unspoiled natural setting but ends tragically when civilization interferes. In a later work, La Chaumière indienne (1790; “The Indian Cottage”), a traveller finds wisdom in the cottage of an Indian outcast. Cultural primitivism, which Bernardin was one of the first to celebrate, became one of the central ideas of the Romantic movement.'
- Overall Condition: Very good
- Size: 8vo (210 x 135 mm)
