FATHER TOM AND THE POPE;: or a Night at the Vatican

Philadelphia: Le Cercle Autour Du Poele, 1861. First, Limited, Deluxe Edition. Hardcover. Fine. Small octavo; viii, 79 pages, full green straight morocco, extra-gilt spine, raised bands, respined with original spine laid down, inner dentelles; bound by Stikeman & Co., NYC; spots on leaf ix/x. Ex libris Thomas W. Bakewell

This classic satire was a product of the youthful pen of that renowned Irish poet, Samuel Ferguson, who was much admired by W. B. Yeats. Ferguson was inspired by his own pastor, Fr. Tom Maguire, in this fictional burlesque of boozing, metaphysics, Latin, theology, algebra, and dogs, mixed with some period ribaldry and vulgarity. In a contest with the Holy Father to discourse only in Latin. Fr. Tom tricks the Bishop of Rome into reverting to the vernacular. He also proves himself to be a better theologian. This is numbered copy 89 of only 98 copies printed for Le Cercle Autour Du Poele. Le Cercle met at John Pennington's Bookstore in Philadelphia. This famed work first appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1838 anonymously. "We indulge the expectation that future editors of this rich morceau will regard ours as the textus receptus, it having been carefully collated with the later and with the editio princeps - Praefatiuncula." A Large-Paper Copy. The story is told in Irish dialect. Formerly attributed to Michael Heffernan, Frederick S. Cozzens, John Fisher Murray, or William Maginn, its authorship was finally claimed by Samuel Ferguson.