Killarney: a Poem

A CELEBRATION OF MAGNIFICENT SCENERY
PIONEERING THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN IRELAND
first edition, London issue 4to. [4 (title and 'Advertisement')], 50, [1 (errata leaf)]pp., engraved vignette on title page, attractive much later marbled boards, printed label on spine, a very nice clean fresh copy.
ESTC t127807 About half of recorded copies of this London edition do not, like this one, have a list of subscribers (including the B.L., Cambridge, N.L.S. copies). The work was first published in Dublin in 1772 with a list of subscribers on a 4-page bifolium. Shared type irregularities show that London edition consists in fact of the Dublin printed sheets supplied with a cancel London title page and omitting (in very many copies) the 4-page list of subscribers for the Dublin edition. An example of such shared irregularities is on p.49 (printed in error in both as '94') on line 14 the letter 's' in the word 'offspring' is slightly offset and is printing lightly inked.Leslie's "wonder and delight" in the magnificent Killarney landscape prompted this fine piece of topographical verse. In it Leslie (1736-1778), tutor to Lord Clanwilliam, took "a separate view of the two lakes, and characterized each of them with its own particular beauties. The same method is observed with regard to the mountains, woods, shrubbery, and every other remarkable object. The description he has endeavoured to enliven with fable and episode. For the sentiment and moral, he makes no apology; having only to hope, that the picture, drawn from his own feelings, may present some pleasing similitude of the great original" [preliminary 'Advertisement'].
A greatly heightened appreciation of landscape, and especially of the picturesque, was a characteristic of the Romantic movement and this is one of its very earliest Irish literary fruits. It was only two years earlier in 1770 that William Gilpin's hugely influential prose work Observations on the River Wye celebrating the picturesque in the English landscape had been published.Vide: John Waters 'Topographical Poetry and the Politics of Ireland 1772-1820' in Romantic Generations, edited by Batten et. al., (2001).
John Wilson Foster 'The Measure of Paradise: Topography in Eighteenth-Century Poetry' in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 9.2 (1975)