Description

INTERESTING COMPILATION OF WORKS BY REVEREND LORENZO DOW, A NOTED AUTHOR FROM THE EARLY 1800s! Fully titled, History of Cosmopolite : Or the Writings of Rev. Lorenzo Dow : Containing His Experience and Travels, in Europe and America, Up to Near His Fiftieth Year. Also, His Polemic Writings. To Which is Added, The "Journey of Life," by Peggy Dow. This is the Eighth Edition (stated on title page), published in 1854 by Applegate, & Co. The copyright page notes a date of 1848, presumably the date of the First Edition of this Tome. This book is in VERY GOOD CONDITION, having been refurbished and reinforced. The leather boards are original, embossed, treated and sealed. The spine is cracked but again is sturdy having been sealed, with rubbed but clear gilt titling and decoration. The title is, L. DOW'S WORKS. The first free endpaper has a name and date - Mar. 31, 1859. No other markings in 720 clean and solidly bound pages, marble page edges. There is foxing throughout, heaviest in the first several (fading to the background amount by about page 25) and last few pages. The book has two portraits to start off the book - the author and his wife, with tissue protection between them. There are no further plates. From Wikipedia: "Lorenzo Dow (October 16, 1777 – February 2, 1834) was an eccentric itinerant American evangelist, said to have preached to more people than any other preacher of his era. He became an important figure and a popular writer. His autobiography at one time was the second best-selling book in the United States, exceeded only by the Bible". Here is the beginning of a lengthy bio found online: "This is the record of a remarkable and eccentric white man who devoted himself to a life of singular labor and self-denial. In any consideration of the South one could not avoid giving at least passing notice to Lorenzo Dow as the foremost itinerant preacher of his time, as the first Protestant who expounded the gospel in Alabama and Mississippi, and as a reformer who, at the very moment when cotton was beginning to be supreme, presumed to tell the South that slavery was wrong. He arrests attention-this gaunt, restless preacher. With his long hair, his flowing beard, his harsh voice, and his wild gesticulation, he was so rude and unkempt as to startle all conservative hearers. Said one of his opponents: "His manners (are) clownish in the extreme; his habit and appearance more filthy than a savage Indian, his public discourses a mere rhapsody, the substance often an insult upon the gospel." Said another as to his preaching in Richmond: "Mr. Dow's clownish manners, his heterodox and schismatic proceedings, and his reflections against the Methodist Episcopal Church, in a late production of his on church government, are impositions on common sense, and furnish the principal reasons why he will be discountenanced by the Methodists." B129