The object of the following pages has been to provide a regular succession of Lyric Exercises, graduated in difficulty according to the progress of the young versifier. A INTRODUCTION. THIS little work was undertaken at the recommendation of a friend, of high position and long experience in one of our great public Schools, who thought it might fill a gap still sensibly felt among elementary aids to Classical Composition. The advantages of Latin Versification are too generally acknowledged to need defence or exposition at the Author's hands; and the practice of providing boys with 'Verse Notes' has justly been preferred to the system which left even beginners to rack their invention for sentiments and language, and thus encouraged a monotony of words and ideas, and the intrusion of gratuitous epithets and other expletives, in order to fill up the chinks of a line: yet some apology for the present volume can hardly seem superfluous, after the very able and useful publications which the Provost of Eton, the Rev. W. Oxenham, and the Rev. T. K. Arnold have contributed to this province of Classical learning. But the 'Sacred Lyrics' of the Provost are obviously so restricted in their subject, as to leave ample room for a work on a different plan: Mr. Oxenham's 'Notes' are confined to Elegiac Verse; while Mr. Arnold's Exercises' range so diffusively through the various kinds of metre, as hardly to afford more than a mere initiation into any in particular. The object of the following pages has been to provide a regular succession of Lyric Exercises, graduated in difficulty according to the progress of the young versifier. A |