Brown speckled leather binding with gilt line edging on both boards. Raised banding, tan title plates with gilt decoration and lettering on the spine. Dimensions are for one volume.

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Dashing, profligate and witty, Sedley was a favourite of Charles II. He ‘gained a deserved reputation.

Sir Charles Sedley, 5th Baronet (March 1639 – 20 August 1701), was an English noble, dramatist and politician. He was principally remembered for his wit and profligacy. His reputation as a wit and dissolute was partially responsible for the Sedleys of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.

 Sedley was reputed as a notorious rake and libertine, part of the “Merry Gang” of courtiers which included the Earl of Rochester and Lord Buckhurst. In 1663 an indecent frolic in Bow Street, for which he was fined 2000 marks, made Sedley notorious. From the balcony of Oxford Kate’s Tavern he, Lord Buckhurst and Sir Thomas Ogle shocked and delighted a crowd of onlookers with their blasphemous and obscene antics. According to Samuel Pepys, Sedley ‘showed his nakedness – and abusing of scripture and as it were from thence preaching a mountebank sermon from the pulpit, saying that there he had to sell such a pouder as should make all the cunts in town run after him, 1000 people standing underneath to see and hear him, and that being done he took a glass of wine and washed his prick in it and then drank it off, and then took another and drank the King’s health.’. This behaviour provoked a riot amongst the onlookers and condemnation in the courts, where the Lord Chief Justice gave his opinion that it was because of wretches like him “that God’s anger and judgement hang over us