The Shrines and Sepulchres of the Old and New World:

A lovely set of this comprehensive work on ancient tombs and funerary practices. This work details the shrines and funerary rites of most major ancient civilisations as well as more contemporary ones along with distinctions between religions. The work addresses the funerary customs of: Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Catholicism, Jerusalem, Mecca and Medina, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Carthage, and Rome, Ancient Mesopotamia including the sites of Nineveh, Babylon, and Persepolis, Ancient Troy and Alexander the Great, Sri Lanka, Sardinia, Canaa, Etruria, Ethiopia, Libya, Scythia, France and Germany, Pompeii, Mesoamerica, Native America, Italy, and Spain.

Richard Robert Madden (1798-1886) was an Irish doctor and writer who became an active abolitionist in the first half of the nineteenth century. He travelled extensively and wrote almost continuously about the places he saw. He oversaw the liberation of the slave populations of Jamaica and Cuba in 1833 and 1835, and provided key evidence in the Amistad trial in New York, and in 1840 he conducted the commission in West Africa which found British merchants guilty of slave trafficking.

First edition; 2 volumes, 8vo (22 x 15 cm); additional engraved titles, 7 lithographed plates, prize inscriptions to first blanks, a little spotting to titles; full leather prize binding, gilt rolled borders to boards with gilt crest to upper boards, spines in six gilt compartments with contrasting green and red gilt morocco lettering pieces, all edges gilt, a touch of spotting to boards but otherwise a very good handsome set; xii, 652; [iv], 692pp.