[Kames] Henry Home, Lord Kames.

Elements of Criticism.

First Irish Edition. Two Volumes [complete]. Dublin, Printed for Sarah Cotter, 1762. Small Octavo (11.2 cm wide x 17.8 cm high). Volume I: VIII, 390 pages / Volume II: 387 pages plus 29 pages of an Index plus 4 pages of Advertising for 18th-century Irish printer and Bookseller, Sarah Cotter: “Books Publish’d by Sarah Cotter in Skinner-Row”. Hardcover / Original full leather with gilt lettering on spine. Name of preowner John Morrison on titlepages [possibly the 18th century – Architect John Morrison from Midleton, with a connection to Castlemartyr]. Very good condition with only minor signs of wear. The very rare, even scarce irish edition of this important publication of the Scottish Aesthetic Movement: “In the popular book Elements of Criticism (1762) Home interrogated the notion of fixed or arbitrary rules of literary composition, and endeavoured to establish a new theory based on the principles of human nature. The late eighteenth-century tradition of sentimental writing was associated with his notion that “the genuine rules of criticism are all of them derived from the human heart.” Neil Rhodes has argued that Lord Kames played a significant role in the development of English as an academic discipline in the Scottish Universities” (Wikipedia).

Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–27 December 1782) was a Scottish writer, philosopher and judge who played a major role in Scotland’s Agricultural Revolution. A central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, he was a founding member of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh and active in The Select Society. Home acted as patron to some of the most influential thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, including philosopher David Hume, economist Adam Smith, writer James Boswell, philosopher William Cullen and naturalist John Walker.

Henry Home was born in 1696 at Kames House, between Eccles and Birgham in Berwickshire. Henry was the son of George Home of Kames, and was homeschooled by Mr Wingate, a private tutor, until the age of 16. In 1712, Home was apprenticed as a lawyer under a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, and was called to the Scottish bar as an advocate bar in 1724. He soon acquired reputation by a number of publications on the civil and Scottish law, and was one of the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment. In 1752, he was “raised to the bench”, thus acquiring the title of Lord Kames.

Kames held an interest in the development and production of linen in Scotland. Kames was one of the original proprietors of the British Linen Company, serving as a director of the company from 1754 to 1756. Kames was on the panel of judges in the Knight v. Wedderburn case which ruled that slavery was illegal in Scotland. In 1775, he lived in a townhouse in Canongate. The house was located the head of the street’s east side, facing onto the Canongate.

Home wrote much about the importance of property to society. In his Essay Upon Several Subjects Concerning British Antiquities, written just after the Jacobite rising of 1745, he showed that the politics of Scotland were based not on loyalty to Kings, as the Jacobites had said, but on the royal land grants that lay at the base of feudalism, the system whereby the sovereign maintained “an immediate hold of the persons and property of his subjects”.

In Historical Law Tracts Home described a four-stage model of social evolution that became “a way of organizing the history of Western civilization”. The first stage was that of the hunter-gatherer, wherein families avoided each other as competitors for the same food. The second was that of the herder of domestic animals, which encouraged the formation of larger groups but did not result in what Home considered a true society. No laws were needed at these early stages except those given by the head of the family, clan, or tribe. Agriculture was the third stage, wherein new occupations such as “plowman, carpenter, blacksmith, stonemason” made “the industry of individuals profitable to others as well as to themselves”, and a new complexity of relationships, rights, and obligations required laws and law enforcers. A fourth stage evolved with the development of market towns and seaports, “commercial society”, bringing yet more laws and complexity but also providing more benefit. Lord Kames could see these stages within Scotland itself, with the pastoral Highlands, the agricultural Lowlands, the “polite” commercial towns of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and in the Western Isles a remaining culture of rude huts where fishermen and gatherers of seaweed eked out their subsistence living.

Home was a polygenist, he believed God had created different races on earth in separate regions. In his book Sketches of the History of Man, in 1774, Home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society could not account for racial differences, so that the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks.

The above studies created the genre of the story of civilization and defined the fields of anthropology and sociology and therefore the modern study of history for two hundred years.

In the popular book Elements of Criticism (1762) Home interrogated the notion of fixed or arbitrary rules of literary composition, and endeavoured to establish a new theory based on the principles of human nature. The late eighteenth-century tradition of sentimental writing was associated with his notion that “the genuine rules of criticism are all of them derived from the human heart.” Neil Rhodes has argued that Lord Kames played a significant role in the development of English as an academic discipline in the Scottish Universities.
He died of old age, aged 86, and is buried in the Home-Drummond plot at Kincardine-in-Menteith west of Blair Drummond.
He was married to Agatha Drummond of Blair Drummond. Their children included George Drummond-Home. (Wikipedia)

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Sarah Cotter (died 1792) was an Irish printer and bookseller in the mid-18th century.
Sarah Cotter was possibly the sister or daughter of the bookseller Joseph Cotter, who died around 1751. She took over his business, operating under Dick’s Coffee House, Skinner Row, Dublin since 1744 and under her auspices until 1774. Cotter is one of the few women to be admitted into the guild of St Luke the Evangelist as a quarter-brother in 1756, which was usually denied to women as they were not permitted full freedom. She paid quarterage to the guild until 1770.

Cotter noticed there was a market for a publisher specialising in legal works, engaging in this work with other printers as she did with Oliver Nelson and Richard Watts (fl. 1745–1762) in the publication of Sir John Strange’s Reports of adjudged cases in the courts of Chancery (1756). She established herself as a law publisher and bookseller, issuing a Sale catalogue of law books for 1766, and advertised regularly with newspapers including the Dublin Journal and Freeman’s Journal.

She fostered links with the book trade in London, importing books and appearing as the Dublin agent on London imprints. Other publications by Cotter included Poems by Eminent Ladies (1757), Shakespeare’s Measure for measure (1761), Philosophical enquiry (4th ed. 1766) by Edmund Burke, and A collection of apothegms and maxims for the good conduct of life by Gorges Edmond Howard (1767).

Cotter married Joseph Stringer (fl. 1754–1783) in 1768. He was a Dublin painter-stainer. Cotter continued to trade under her married name, printing The wonder! or a woman keeps a secret a play by Susanna Centlivre the same year. Her husband and former apprentice Charles Ingham (fl. 1747–1792) managed the business from 1768, with Cotter officially retiring in 1774. Cotter wrote to Philip Skelton on 21 September 1784 from Summerhill, Dublin, praising his book An appeal to commonsense on the subject of Christianity.

To promote his ideas, she offered and paid for a cheaper edition to be printed to allow for a wider circulation. Later, he gave her permission to have his portrait drawn, on the proviso that no copies would be made and Cotter would destroy it before her death. She did so three months before her death in 1792, with her will proved at the Dublin prerogative court the same year. Cotter’s books are included in the 1916 A catalogue of the Bradshaw collection of Irish books in the University of Cambridge 1602–1882. (Wikipedia)

• Keywords: 18th Century – Irish Country House Library · Books on Books Rare · Catalogue Irish History Two – Origins of Irish Identity · Catalogue Three – Literature by Women · Catalogue Twelve – Philosophy · Dublin – 18th century Printing History · Dublin – 18th century Printing History – Sarah Cotter · Dublin Printing History · Irish History in the 18th century · Irish History of Law · Philosophy Rare · Scottish Culture · Scottish Enlightenment · Scottish History · Scottish History Rare · Scottish Literature · Scottish Philosophy · Women as Printers in 18th century Europe · Women in History · Women in History – Rare · Women in Irish History · Women in Irish Society
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 32425AB

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