New Method of Studying History: recommending more Essays and Complete Instructions for Improvements in that Science than any hitherto extant: with the whole Apparatus necessary to form a Perfect Historian. To which is added a dissertation by Count Scipio Maffei of Verona concerning the use of inscriptions and medals. by way of parallel. Originally written in French by M. Langlet du Fresnoy... Since translated into Italian, with considerable additions. The whole made English, with variety of improvements and corrections. A catalogue of the chief historians of all nations, their best editions, and characters of their writings. In two volumes. Richard Rawlinson. London: printed for W. Burton; and sold by J. Batley; C. Rivington; W. Meadows; L. Gilliver; J. Ayshford; and J. Wilcox.1728. First edition. [8], xxii, 23-360, [8]; title-page, 550, [48] printed pages (front free endpaper of volume two loose; small hole in margin of page 365/6 in volume 2). Woodcut head and tail pieces. Contemporary bookplates on front free endpapers of Robert Parker , F.A.S. Robert Parker (1754–1837), a lawyer and banker at Maidstone and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, was Percy Bysshe Shelley's uncle. Written over a period of four months from late February to mid-June 1811, Parker's ‘Letters on Atheism’ constitute the most intelligent and most sustained contemporary reply to Shelley's pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism (1811), for which he and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg were expelled from University College, Oxford. Based largely on William Wollaston's The Religion of Nature Delineated (1724), Sir Richard Blackmore's Natural Theology (1728), and other eighteenth-century works, Parker's rather dated arguments for the existence of a creative Deity did not convince Shelley, but they may have changed his attitude toward natural religion and prompted him to supplement The Necessity of Atheism with A Refutation of Deism (1814). Speckled edges -top edges dust stained. 134 x 206 mm. Contemporary speckled calf; spines in six compartments with raised bands and maroon label with gilt titling; boards with double line fillet borders (upper hinges broken, front boards very weak; spines and edges rubbed and corners worn). Sabin, 40029. English Short Title Catalog, T139624. 855342461. Uncommon in commerce, with an interesting provenance.