The editors gratefully acknowledge their obligations to all who have placed at their disposal materials for this volume. In the selection, as it is designed to meet the practical needs of schoolmasters and to provide an advanced course of composition, preference has been given to short and simple passages for translation, showing considerable variety of style and subject, yet at the same time some affinity to the classical models. Longer poems, extracts suited for translation in the less familiar metres and dialects, abstruse or intractable specimens of English prose have been sparingly introduced. The fair copies, now for the first time published, have been carefully revised with the general aim of ensuring correctness; but in regard to orthography no rigid uniformity has been enforced.

Finally the editors desire to express their thanks to those authors who have courteously permitted them to reprint passages from their own works, namely, to Mr Andrew Lang, the Right Hon. W. E. H. Lecky, M.P., Dr James Martineau, Mr A. C. Swinburne, and Mr William Watson: also to the following gentlemen acting as literary executors, Mr C. Baxter for R. L. Stevenson; Mr E. E. Bowen for his brother Lord Bowen; Mr Cockerell and Mr F. S. Ellis for William Morris; Mr A. Egmont Hake and Mr H. Wilson Hake for their father Dr T. G. Hake; Mr Aldis Wright for Edward FitzGerald, and Messrs Macmillan with him as part-owner of copyright; also to Mr W. M. Meredith as representing Mr George Meredith.