Etchings, with Photographs from Original Drawings, Poetical and Prose Fragments, and a Prefatory Memoir

The antiquarian collector, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe (1781-1851), is remembered for his work and interest in literature, music and the fine arts. His studies - ranging from ballads and Scottish popular poetry to the origins and history of witchcraft in Scotland - remain key to understanding these subjects today. This volume - first published in Edinburgh in 1869, almost twenty years after Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe's death - offers both an overview of his life and a more detailed introduction to the scope of two of his main areas of activity. The compilation begins with a Memoir, which uses extracts from CKS's notebooks and correspondence to present a character sketch of the man sometimes known as the 'Scottish Horace Walpole'. This is followed by a selection of Ballads and Other Poems, categorised as Romantic and Sentimental, Comic and Satirical, and of Prose Fragments. CKS's particular skill as an artist and humorist was noted by Sir Walter Scott, in his diary of 1825, where he declared his friend's drawings as "the most fanciful and droll imaginable - a mixture between Hogarth and some of those foreign masters who painted temptations of St.Anthony, and such grotesque subjects". The final section of this volume contains a catalogued selection of twenty-seven Etchings and nine Drawings.