A collection of Oliver Goldsmith’s Essays on Education translated into French by M. Dampmartin, untouched in original wrappers. The text seems to be based on a 1775 publication of The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmiths, M.B. Containing all his Essays and Poems which gathered together essays previously published across a number of ultimately ephemeral pamphlets.
Beginning with The story of Alcander and Sptimus, passing through Goldsmith’s Treatise On Education, and ending with an essay On Friendship, the collection threads together ideas about the nature of happiness, of friendship and community as well as the importance of receiving an education that simultaneously nurtures intellectual growth and moral character. These enlightenment ideals are tunefully sounded in crescendos of humour and wit balanced with reflective and thoughtful diminuendos. In this publication the translator Dampmartin frames Goldsmith’s works with a foreword and commentaries that follow each essay.
Published in 1803 when Napoleon was still First Consul of the French Republic, Dampmartin’s musings refer to the then recent history of the country. The foreword announces the translation “amid the moral fragments in which it was formed” [‘cette traduction fut annoncee dans les Fragmens moreaux don’t ell forme’] in reference to the shattered ideals of the enlightenment that were turned dark under the reign of terror. In this context Goldsmith’s essays are offered as something as a salve to a country still ‘waking from a terrible illness’, its people compared to the members of a family still learning to love one another after a ‘disastrous quarrel’ [‘Accourez tous avec empressement, avec confiance, mais avec l’espirit de sagasse et de moderation. Votre patrie est un corps vigoureux qui releve d’un maladie non moins longs que terrible’]. Dampmartain previously wrote Des Romans, a memoir of the events of the French revolution and consequent emigration. This copy of Goldsmith’s translated essays is inscribed on the verso of the half title: ‘Offert par l’auter a son tres aimable et bon camarade Charrin’.
Advertised in the back of the text are series of books also sold and published by Ducaroy which include Dampmartin’s des Romans, a translation of English physician David Hartley’s treatise Upon Man’s physical and intellectual faculties, as well as a book by a woman: Felicite Gueroit Saint Martain on the education and happiness of women: De l’Education et du Bonheur des Femmes’.
