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ANDOVER:
WARREN F. DRAPER.

BOSTON.- GOULD & LINCOLN. NEW YORK: JOHN WILEY.

PHILADELPHIA: SMITH, ENGLISH ft CO.

1860.

This edition of Augustine's Confessions is a reprint of an old translation, by an author unknown to the editor, which was republished in Boston in 1843. A very little use has also been made of Pusey's edition, published at Oxford. This contains only ten books, and where it differs from the old version, almost uniformly differs for the worse.

The principal labor in preparing this edition, has been to make a careful comparison of the whole work with the Latin text, and to add a few explanatory notes. The object of comparing the old version with the original, was not so much to make changes, — for the translation, as a whole, like all the early English translations from Latin iv Advertisement.

and Greek, is remarkably faithful and vivid, — as to remove obscurities. These arose, in some few instances, from too great conciseness upon the part of the translator; but in many more, from errors in printing and punctuating. In course of time, under the hands of editors and proof-readers, the long and involved sentences of Augustine had become so dislocated, that nothing but a recurrence to the Latin text would restore them to the form in which the translator had originally given them. This was especially true of the last three books, which are exceedingly subtile and abstract in their trains of thought, and in many passages had become totally obscure. The editor flatters himself that this revised edition exhibits the old translation substantially as it was at first, and that it will be found to be intelligible.