This attractive rare view of Chester was published in Daniel Meisner’s ‘Thesaurus Philo-Politicus’. Published in 1623-30 it ranks among the classic collections of city views alongside those of Munster, Braun and Hogenberg and Merian. Text is supplied by J. L. Gottfried and the plates by Mathias Merian, Sebastian Furck and G. Keller. Each scene displays a foreground message embodying a moral explained below in Latin and German verse. Here the translation is “Evil harms itself”. Meisner was born in Chomutov in what is now the Czech Republic but little is known of his life. The introduction to this work cites him as a ‘Poeta Laureatus’. An example of the second state as published c.1640. Landwehr no. 426.