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"Thomas Badeslade, an engineer and surveyor, drew this remarkably beautiful series of English county maps in 1724. According to the title page, Francis Negus (1670-1732) intended to present the work to the king for a planned royal tour of the country. Negus, a former soldier and courtier, served under William I in Flanders before succeeding his father-in-law as a member of Parliament for Ipswich in 1717. That same year he was appointed to a prestigious court position as Commissioner for Executing the Office of the Master of the Horse. Although it appears he would have had the opportunity to present the atlas to the king, there is no evidence that he ever did. Certainly the tour never took place. The thirty-nine county maps are based on surveys published by Herman Moll, a Dutch cartographer who had moved to England in 1680. Badeslade's drawings were later engraved by William Henry Toms and published in 1742 under the title “Chorographia Britanniae” (also in Mellon's collections and now at the Center). Mellon's manuscript is most likely the "pocket book" mentioned on that work's title page, "first drawn and compiled ... by order and for the use of His late Majesty King George I." Toms's work was a considerable success, perhaps one of the two or three bestselling county atlases published in the eighteenth century. It was the first county atlas to be truly pocket size and immediately found a substantial and hitherto unexploited market."--Elisabeth Fairman. Paul Mellon's Legacy: a Passion for British Art: Masterpieces from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2007, p. 307, no. 138, N5220.M552 P38 2007+ OVERSIZE (YCBA)