The Tears of a Grateful People, A Hebrew Dirge … [for the] …Funeral of His Late Most Sacred Majesty King George III…, Hyman Hurwitz [Translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge], London: H. Barnett [1820]

Hyman Hurwitz (1770–1844), was born in Poznan, Poland, in 1770 and came to England about 1797. He conducted a private academy for Jews at Highgate, where he also met and established a close friendship with, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1828, on Coleridge's recommendation, Hurwitz was appointed as the first professor of Hebrew language and literature at University College, London. Hurwitz’s writings included an impassioned defense of the Hebrew Bible as well as several treatises on the Hebrew language. He was also the author of numerous Hebrew hymns, odes, elegies, and dirges including the present work, as well as an earlier dirge, also translated by Coledridge, on the occasion of the funeral of Princess Charlotte in 1817.

There are only three recorded copies printed on satin including the Royal Presentation copy of King George IV; this copy, a fourth, was, quite plausibly, presented by Coleridge to his dear friend and personal physician James Gillman, in whose Highgate home Coleridge lived for the last 18 years of his life, and whose bookplate is on the front pastedown endpaper. In 1931, Novelist, playwright and essayist John Boynton Priestly purchased the Gillman home and the book passed into his hands; his bookplate is mounted opposite Gillman’s.


LITERATURE:
Vinograd, London 233 "heh”; Cecil Roth, Magna Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica, p. 341, no. 14


PROVENANCE:
James Gillman-his bookplate on the front pastedown endpaper; John Boynton Priestly-his bookplate on the front free endpaper; Robert Vaughan, liquidator of the Priestly Library, from whom it was purchased by the current owner.