£120
24mo, pp. 47, [1]. 8 leaves of plates printed in sanguine included within pagination. Original drab paper wrappers pasted to first and last leaves as issued, front wrapper lettered in ink. Wrappers rubbed to one corner and a little creased.
A scarce chapbook abridgement of this popular devotional work, one of several printed by Glasgow publisher James Lumsden, with 14 striking woodcuts printed in red. The whiff of a Bewick attribution hangs about it, probably spuriously, although Tattersfield does record contemporary Lumsden chapbooks as using blocks from Bewick's workshops, and Hugo attributes to Bewick the woodcuts in a different Lumsden Divine Songs from the same period. Uvin and Pafford between them suggest a genealogy for the plates that may go back to a Newcastle printing, possibly by Bewick or his workshop, though Tattersfield does not record Pafford's suggested original source among several known Bewick Divine Songs.
This edition may be Pafford's B96, which matches the pagination, though that entry notes the contents as 22 songs, not the 26 present here; this may be a typo in Pafford or, given the proliferation and modern scarcity of editions it may be a separate printing. Certainly Roscoe & Brimmell list other printings known to them only from advertisements.
The source of its plates notwithstanding, this is an attractive and scarce survival, with Library Hub recording only Cambridge, and Roscoe and Brimmell adding BM, Glasgow and Boston Public Library.
