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Oxford

PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

BY HORACE HART, M.A.

PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

EDITOR'S

PREFACE

THE manuscript of Mr. Sellar's book was entrusted to me at the end of last year, and the duty of seeing it through the press undertaken, in accordance with his wishes.

The chapters on Horace, and the four chapters on the Elegiac Poets, ending with the criticism of the poetry of Propertius, are complete. The chapter on the Odes of Horace (from the middle of Section II. p. 149, ‘If Horace lived,' &c., to the end, p. 199) has had less of the author's revision than the others: the manuscript, however, is perfectly clear and continuous. The rest of the Horace and the four chapters of the Elegiac Poets were written out for the printers by Mr. Sellar.

The passage on the birthplace of Propertius was sent by the author to the Classical Review, and appeared in November 1890. The chapter on Ovid (Elegiac Poets, chapter V) is not in the same condition as the rest of the book. It represents the notes made by Mr. Sellar for chapters on the same scale as the others. These notes leave some parts of the subject untouched—the biography of Ovid, for example, and his later poems. It might have been possible to supplement this chapter from the essay on Ovid contributed by Mr. Sellar to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the publishers of the Encyclopaedia, Messrs. Adam and Charles Black, generously gave permission to make use of it for the present volume.

But it was thought better, in the end,

to add nothing to the notes left by Mr. Sellar, except the merely formal modifications necessary in order to complete or to arrange some of the more fragmentary passages.

The proofs of Mr. Sellar's book have been read by Professor Butcher and Mr. J. W. Mackail. Of my private debt, for help and advice, this is not the place for me to speak.

W. P. KER,

LONDON,

10 October, 1891.

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