PREFACE. THIS ANTHOLOGY is intended for use among the Junior and Middle Classes in Schools. With this view, the Extracts have been carefully graduated in point of difficulty: and the Notes will, it is hoped, be found to be adapted to the successive stages of the pupil's progress. From the commencement to about the 28th of the selections from Ovid, the Notes are almost entirely confined to simple explanations of the poet's meaning: afterwards, the more advanced portions of the book being designed for a higher class of pupils, they are illustrative, as well as explanatory, and occasionally critical. Throughout, however, I have endeavoured to explain, not merely difficult and exceptional, but common constructions: such, for instance as the use of the subjunctive mood in relative and other clauses: a branch of syntax often very imperfectly understood even by pupils in the highest forms.* *The pupil is presumed to have access to a dictionary in which proper names are given: if not to Dr. Smith's Dictionaries of Classical Mythology and Antiquities, in their abridged form. |