The Statesman's Manual; or the Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight: A Lay Sermon Addressed to the Higher Classes of Society AND A Lay Sermon, Addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes, on the Existing Distresses and Discontents.
Burlington, [Vermont]: Chauncey Goodrich, 1832.
Price: $250.00
About the item
First American editions, published together with continuous pagination and two title pages. Half-title, 231 pp. 12mo. Original drab boards, with spine in brown linen, and original spine label. Some. Shaw-Shoemaker 11893, Haney, Coleridge, 45.
Item #378762
First American edition of Coleridge’s lay sermon on the application of Biblical precepts to political thought. This is the first of Coleridge's two lay sermons, written at the behest of his publisher Gale and Fenner, who wished Coleridge to address England's postwar economic distress following victory over Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. This first sermon is a philosophical treatise directed at a learned audience; it was largely met with incomprehension and was viciously attached by Hazlitt. The second sermon, A Lay Sermon, directed to the middle classes and written in a more accessible style, followed in 1817. A third sermon, to be directed to the lower and laboring classes, was announced but never appeared.
A Lay Sermon appears here at p. 71. This is the third volume of Coleridge produced by Goodrich, who also published The Friend (1931) and Aids to Reflection (1829).
