8vo. xii, 227pp, [1]. Contemporary half-calf, marbled paper boards, tooled in gilt and blind. Rubbed, upper joint split, lower joint starting.Bookplate of Thomas Bell and ticket of bookseller H. Gray of Manchester to FEP, very occasional spotting.

The first edition of Cumberland poet Robert Anderson's (1770-1833) first published collection of verse. A native of Carlisle, Anderson received little formal education. A pattern drawer by trade, whose admiration for poetry would be kindled by attending recitations at Vauxhall Gardens, he would come to be admired, particularly with the publication of his second volume Ballads in the Cumberland Dialect (1805), receiving praise from Poets Laureate Robert Southey and William Wordsworth.

The collection notably includes the ten-stanza composition entitled simply 'The Slave', a poem which employs an enslaved African as a framing device for a critique of ambition;

'Torn from every dear connection,
Forc'd across the yielding wave,
The Negro, stung by keen reflection,
May exclaim, Man's but a Slave!'

This literal condition of an enslaved African is juxtaposed in the following stanzas with metaphorical forms of 'slavery', such as pride and ambition, each further trivialising the opening lines.