This book its titled "Floriant & Florete, A Metrical Romance Of The Fourteenth Century Edited from a Unique Manuscript at Newbattle Abbey" by Francisque-Michel, published by The Roxburghe Club in Edinburgh and printed By R. & R. Clark in MDCCCLXXIII [1873], and a first edition. The book is 3/4 bound, with gilt lettering on the spine, blank endpapers, speckled boards, the half-title and an example of an illuminated manuscript for the frontispiece, followed by a tissue guard and title page, a dedication page with a facsimile signature of "Lothian", a subscriber's page, a long Preface (ix or b - xxxii), Notes from xxxiii - lxv, an Errata page, the text, which is 296 pages long, and the top edge is gilt. The book should hold a strong interest for scholars of King Arthur. It is part of the Arthurian romances written in Old French, and the word "romance" does not refer to love, but to a prose or poetical narrative written in a "Romance language," or one of the many languages descended from Latin. (The book here is from the Old French and written in French.) It tells the tale of Floriant, the son of the King of Sicily, who lost his inheritance through a disloyal household steward; abducted as a baby by Morgan Le Fay, Floriant is raised in the secret castle of Mongibel until he is fifteen, when he departs on an enchanted ship to go on various adventures; eventually he reaches King Arthur's court in Britain, where he learns his own name and the name of his father, and having discovered his true identity, departs for Sicily with King Arthur's armada in order to avenge his father's death and deliver his mother from a siege that had been raised against her by the treacherous household steward. The Roxburghe Club is a bibliophile and publishing society based in the United Kingdom and dates back to about 1812, and some of its members were Sir Walter Scott (elected 1822), James Russell Lowell (elected 1884), William Osler (a noted medical author), and Sir John Paul Getty, a British philanthropist and book collector, among others. The book measures 10 7/8 x 8 7/8 in. wide, with a tight binding and clean pages and text, with a couple of brown spots on the front endpapers and on the rear paste-down, rubbing on the heel and crown, light scrapes on a leather triangle, light wear at the tips, and the back cover is bowed in a bit, and still an attractive copy of this hard-to-find title. The book is rare - we couldn't find any listed on the rare book website we use, except for modern reprints - and WorldCat lists a few copies in Special Collections around the world, but many are ebooks and on microfilm and not the original first editions, and an interesting title for those love fantasy and can read French. #85 #1675