Bailey, Ebenezer. The Young Ladies' Class Book; A Selection of Lessons for Reading, in Prose and Verse. Boston: Lincoln and Edmands, &c., 1831. (First Edition). [12425]
Full brown calf with a brown leather spine title label, gilt lines to spine, a few small worm holes and a little surface cracking, with the joints still strong and tight, 7 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches. 1834 & 1874 owner's inscriptions in brown ink on the ffep; name in brown ink on title page with "1887" in blue ink beneath it; lacks the second front free end paper (blank). [1]-vii, [9]-408 pages; foxing; pp. vi. and iv. numbered improperly; lacks the two final end papers (blanks). Good. Hardcover.
Presumed first edition, with matching imprint & copyright date.
"Grace in eloquence - in the pulpit, at the bar - cannot be separated from grace in ordinary manners, in private life, in the social circle, in the family. It cannot well be superinduced upon all the other acquisitions of youth, any more than that nameless, but invaluable quality, called good breeding. You may, therefore, begin the work of forming the orator with your child; not merely by teaching him to declaim, but, what is of much more consequence, by observing and correcting his daily manners, motions, and attitudes." - p. [9].
Several hundred short entries by American and English authors, including Joseph Addison, Miss Catherine E. Beecher, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Chalmers, William Ellery Channing, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Cowper, Timothy Dwight, Miss Maria Edgeworth, Edward Everett, Timothy Flint, Convers Francis, James Freeman, Mrs. Felicia Hemans, Washington Irving, John Milton, Hannah More, John Pierpont, Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney, Miss Jane Taylor, Daniel Webster, Nathaniel P. Willis, William Wordsworth, and Edward Young.
Ebenezer Bailey (1795-1839), b. West Newbury, Mass.; d. Lynn, Mass. He graduated from Yale College (1817), and began an illustrious career as a teacher, leading schools for both girls and boys, and was a leading founder of the American Institute of Instruction, a Boston-based society for school teachers.
"Bailey was at various times a member of the city council of Boston, director of the Home of Reform, president of the Boston Lyceum, and director of the Boston Mechanics Institute. He was a frequent contributor to the Boston Courier and other periodicals, and edited The Young Ladies' Class-Book (Boston, 1831); Blakewell's Philosophical Conversations (1832); and First Lessons on Algebra (1833)." - Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography, Vol. I., p. 136.
