PREFACE

Summary

Mr. Nettleship's intellectual activity expressed itself in three forms, all marked by fine literary taste and judgement, (1) As a Latin scholar he was concerned peculiarly with Vergil and Latin lexicography, and in dealing with these subjects he paid especial attention to grammarians and glossaries. By tracing the sources and establishing the relations of writers like Festus, Nonius, Servius, Gellius, he hoped to recover the earliest text and interpretation of Vergil and the vocabulary of republican and Augustan Latin. (2) But in pursuing these researches he always kept in view the ultimate literary end, and he devoted many essays and lectures to the appreciation of the Aeneid, the Satura, and other Latin literature. His most characteristic work was, perhaps, literary criticism, and the fine taste and wide sympathy which went with it led him (3), especially in his later years, to write and lecture on educational or philosophical topics unconnected with Latin scholarship.

The present volume contains all Mr. Nettleship's scattered writings on Latin literature and on general subjects—that is, all that comes under the second and third classes enumerated, so far as these contributions were not included in his former volume of Lectures and Essays issued in 1885. The two volumes thus contain all Mr. Nettleship's literary work in a collected shape, while a bibliography which I have appended to this volume will facilitate reference to his uncollected contributions to technical scholarship, grammarians, glossaries, and the like.