PREFACE. I HAVE attempted the somewhat difficult task of steering a middle course between a critical translation of Cicero's Letters for the scholar, and a Life of Cicero, told mainly by himself, for the English reader, and perhaps the long time which this work has required has caused some inconsistency of method. That a new translation was really needed seems to me beyond a doubt. The swelling paraphrase of Melmoth, the laboured dullness of Heberden, and the almost unknown version of Guthrie, are all that, so far as I am aware, exist in English; while the French rendering by the Abbé Mongault glides indeed with French neatness round every difficulty, but never surmounts one. And yet so frequent are these difficulties, that even when following in the track of so careful and scholarly an editor as Mr. Watson, I have constantly been obliged to support my own version with a minute critical discussion of the text or its renderings, which to an English reader must, I fear, be intolerably dull. Neither is there such a Life of Cicero told by means of his Letters as I have here contemplated. Dr. Merivale's translation of Abeken's 'Cicero in seinen Briefen' is indeed a most useful work, to which I have |