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THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE'S ARCADIA.

SIDNEY, Philip, Sir.  THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE'S ARCADIA.

London: William Du-Gard, 1655. Folio. Contemporary full-calf. Frontispiece, (xxxii), 624, (26) pages. Tenth edition.

A fine copy in original condition of this great Elizabethan chivalric romance.  First edition to include Sidney's A Remedie for Love, the first to be indexed, and the first published portrait of Sidney.  Scholars have long emphasized the importance of this edition, which is surprisingly scarce.  Not in Pforzheimer.  The biography discusses Sidney's ancestry, his education at Oxford and on the Continent, his foreign embassies, and his marriage.  Bookplate (eighteenth century?) on inside of front board.  Very good.

 

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