Boileau published his Œuvres diverses in 1674, when he was thirty-eight. The volume comprises revised versions of poems already published as well as works seeing print for the first time. The most substantial of the newly published works, a translation of Longinus, is also the only one specifically named in the title: Œuvres diverses du Sieur D*** avec le traité du Sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours traduit du grec de Longin. An introductory text, ‘To the Reader’, accounts for the presence of the translation: ‘I originally made this Translation to instruct myself rather than with the intention of giving it to the Public. But I believed that people would not be offended to find it here following the [Art poétique], with which this Treatise has some relation, and in which I have even inserted several precepts that are taken from it.’ The modesty of this statement finds an echo in the ‘Préface’ to the translation itself (pp. 333–40). There, after presenting a brief anecdotal sketch of its presumed author, Cassius Longinus, Boileau says that the treatise manifests its author's qualities: ‘His sentiments have something about them that marks not only a sublime mind, but a soul that is far above the ordinary’. He therefore has no regrets about the time – ‘some of my evenings’ – he has spent translating such an excellent work, especially since he is in a position to say with confidence that ‘it has hitherto been understood only by a very small number of scholars’ (p. 336).