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Notes
I would like to thank the Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement, and in particular His Grace the Duke of Devonshire, for permitting me to examine Burlington's library at first-hand in the Library at Chatsworth. I am also grateful to the Keeper of Collections at Chatsworth, Mr Peter Day, for his valued assistance.
Rosoman provides a description of the rooms and their uses in the eighteenth century. See his article "The Decoration and Use of the Principal Apartments of Chiswick House, 1727-70," The Burlington Magazine, CXXVII, Number 991 (October, 1985), 663-667, particularly p. 676 and n. 75, but with this compare p. 675.
The writing is in Burlington's distinctive hand. In a few instances he noted the shelf on which he had placed the title, and its format—"8vo," "4to," etc.
Rudolf Wittkower counts four at Chatsworth, but on my count there are only three. See Chapter Six, "English Neo-classicism and the Vicissitudes of Palladio's Quattro Libri," in Wittkower's Palladio and Palladianism (1974), p. 85.
While I have taken care to check the sums, all figures, given human fallibility, should be taken as approximate.
Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, l. 140, from the Twickenham edn. of The Poems of Alexander Pope, III.ii, Epistles to Several Persons, ed. F. W. Bateson (1951; ed. cit., 1961), p. 151.
Statistics on the age of the books in Burlington's Chiswick Library are based on the dates given in the Catalogue and generally represent titles rather than volumes, except that whenever multiple dates are specified in the Catalogue for multiple-volume works (something that was not done consistently), each given date is represented. This procedure is inevitably something of a compromise, though it affects the figures very little.
Burlington may have possessed two copies of this. The Catalogue lists, on shelf two, "Alberti, De Re Ædificatoria Florentia 1-85."
Some of these notes are quoted by James Lees-Milne in his section on Burlington in Earls of Creation: Five Great Patrons of Eighteenth-Century Art (1962).
On this matter and a range of connections between Burlington and Vitruvius see my recent article, "Pope's Epistle to Burlington: the Vitruvian Analogies," Studies in English Literature, 30 (1990), 429-444.
Jonathan Sisson (1690-1749) was an eminent instrument-maker, from April 1729 Instrument Maker to the Prince of Wales. His work is discussed in E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Hanoverian England (1966), pp. 143-144. See also Nicholas Goodison, English Barometers 1680-1860 (1977), pp. 242-243. The accounts book, containing the joint accounts of Richard Graham and Jacob Collier, is at Chatsworth. The same book reveals Burlington's patronage of George Graham and the silversmith Anthony Nelme.
On Eccleston see Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, p. 230. Burlington's purchase of one of Eccleston's instruments enables Taylor's entry to be updated from "fl. 1751" to "fl. 1747-51."
A number of Elliott's tools may be identified on the bindings illustrated in the two plates. Of those illustrated in Plate 15 of Howard Nixon, "Harleian bindings," Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard (1975), tools 2 and 10, for instance, are found on the binding illustrated at the top-left of Plate II here; tool 19 is found on the binding illustrated on the bottom-right of the same plate; and compare tool 1 with the similar tool in the lozenge area of the binding illustrated on Plate I. Compare, too, the outer roll and the wave-pattern roll in the border of the binding illustrated by Nixon on his Plate 11 with the outer roll and the wave-pattern roll in the border of the binding illustrated on my Plate I. A more detailed analysis of the Burlington bindings will be the subject of a separate article still in preparation.
See illustration 15 in Rosoman, "The Decoration and Use of the Principal Apartments of Chiswick House, 1727-70," p. 673.
Accounts book for the period 1719-22, at Chatsworth. Stephen Bolton is recorded as a bookseller in London in 1713, when according to Henry Plomer he published the sixth edition of Arbuthnot's Complete Key to "Law is a Bottomless Pit." See Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1668 to 1725 (1922), p. 40.
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