1790. Small 8vo (160 x 100 mm), engraved frontispiece by Luigi Schiavonetti after William Hamilton and pp. viii, 96, a couple of minimal stains in the text, in contemporary free-style tree calf, the upper section of the front board a little discoloured, joints and extremities slightly worn, flat spines gilt in compartments, dark green morocco label lettered in gilt, with the modern pictorial bookplate of Séan Ó Corcora on the front pastedown. Second edition. A series of botanical fables written by a mother for her daughters, using flowers as vessels to explore subjects such as scandal, vulgarity, temptation, folly and vanity. There are twenty-two fables in all, each one representing a human emotion, good and bad, although mostly the latter. Wonder and Felicity have their place but there is much more of envy, cruelty and despair. Some of the fables have subtitles indicating which 'enchanted plant' the fable features, such as 'Scandal; or, the Painted-lady Sweet Pea'. The Advertisement also points out that there are a ‘few notes that she wrote to her children [which] may be of use to young readers’ at the back of the book. These notes are largely botanical.
A particularly lovely fable takes the form of a conversation between the Ivy and the Woodbine in Fable VII, Envy, where the Ivy that grows on a ‘humble peasants hut’ looks below, enviously, at the ‘sea of gold’ as the ‘Woodbine flaunted below’. After lamenting her envy, the Ivy realises that she is being foolish for being envious as it is ‘flexible and tender, formed / by nature to depend / canst boast, what mortals few possess / the blessing of a friend’ (p29). Rewarded for her humility and awareness, a ‘tempest raves’ and the Ivy ‘blessed the friendly shed’ gratefully. But the unsheltered stretch of land is no match for the gale that rages, and so the fate of the woodbine is less happy, as its ‘golden blossoms wide dispersed/ yielded to the blast’.
Maria Henrietta Montolieu was the daughter of James Modyford Heywood, MP for Fowey in Cornwall, Lord of the Admiralty and a plantation owner in Jamaica. She married Louis Montolieu who was a candidate in the 1790 Leicester parliamentary election. These fables were written for her daughters and the work is inscribed to them. The first edition was privately printed in 1800 and is extremely scarce. Maria Montolieu is also the author of The Festival of the Rose, London, 1802.
q.v. Cotsen, I: The Nineteenth Century, 3948 and ESTC t188715 (first editions); not in Osborne Collection.