Fifth Edition. 16mo. 6d. THE LAWS OF THE GREEK ACCENTS. By the Rev. JOHN GRIFFITHS. Uniform with the Oxford Pocket Classics. JOHN HENRY PArker, Oxford and London. BUCOLICA VIRGILII. THE BUCOLICS OF VIRGI L. WITH SHORT ENGLISH NOTES OXFORD, JOHN HENRY PARKER; AND 377, STRAND, LONDON. M DCCC LIV. PREFACE. THE Bucolics of Virgil are perhaps too commonly thought to be a book for beginners. This popular, though erroneous, estimate has occasioned, especially in the notes on a few of the first, much elementary matter to be mingled with the notice of difficulties which mere early scholarship would hardly feel. These poems are chiefly important for the many historical allusions which they contain, and which illustrate, from a point of view which no other writer has exactly seized, a few momentous years of the Augustan period. They belong to the literature of a civil war, from the havoc of which Italy perhaps never thoroughly recovered; and the interest which they thus possess far transcends the languid beauty of imitative pastorals. |