16mo 172pp., with an engraved frontispiece and title page. Tegg’s Miniature Edition. 1810. Full calf, boards worn and joints cracked lacking pieces of the spine. Contents clean apart from some foxing of the frontis and title page.

Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful exerted a strong influence on the Romantic and Gothic movements. Burke proposes that beauty stimulates love, but that the sublime excites horror. While beauty relaxes, the sublime brings tension. The feeling that something is sublime is triggered by extremes – vastness, extreme height, difficulty, darkness or excessive light.