WOLCOT, John ("Peter PINDAR")

Sir Joseph Banks and the Emperor of Morocco. A Tale...

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G. Kearsley, London, 1788. Quarto, 28 pp. including the half-title, with an engraved plate; a fine copy in old style half calf over marbled boards, antique. One of the best-known attacks on Joseph Banks by the vicious satirist John Wolcot (1738-1819), who wrote under the pseudonym of "Peter Pindar". In this long poetic squib he makes wide-ranging fun of Banks, mocking his collecting (the "Emperor of Morocco" is a fictitious butterfly) and particularly his post as president of the Royal Society:

'That though Sir Joseph is not deep-discerning,

And though, as all the world well knows,

A nutshell might with perfect ease enclose

Three quarters of his sense, and all his learning;

Whose modest wisdom, therefore, never aims

To find the longitude, or burn the Thames...'

The poem is accompanied by an unsigned and uncaptioned engraving of Banks foppishly chasing butterflies with nets in a botanic garden, trampling a gardener in his eagerness. This is the supposed third edition of the poem, though such edition statements were sometimes misleadingly exaggerated to suggest heavy sales. Certainly it appeared in numerous different printings and in various editions of "Peter Pindar's" collected works.

Ode to Sir Joseph Banks, on the report of his elevation to the important dignity of a Privy Counsellor (1797).
Beddie, 3929; Carter, Sir Joseph Banks 1743-1820, p. 296.

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• 订书号：: 708_292

• 书商: Hordern House (AUSTRALIA)