The oldest extant manuscript of his works is probably that in the public library of Berne, and dates from the ninth century. The earliest printed edition, bearing neither date nor printer's name, is supposed to have been published at Milan in 1470. Editions were also printed at Florence and at Venice in 1482, and a third at Venice in 1492. An illustrated edition on vellum was brought out by Aldus in 1501, and reissued in 1509, 1514, 1519. The Florence Press of the Giunti produced splendid specimens in 1503, 1514, 1519. Between this date and the end of the century seven more came forth from famous presses. Of modern editions we may notice the vellum Bodoni folio of 1791, and the matchless Didot of 1799 with its exquisite copperplate vignettes. Fortunate is the collector who possesses the genuine first edition of Pine's "Horace," 1733. It is known by an error in the text, corrected in the subsequent and less bibliographically valuable impression of the same year. A beautifully pictorial book is Dean Milman's; the student will prefer Orelli, Macleane, Yonge, Munro and King, or Dean Wickham's scholarly volumes. * * * * * In composing this modest little book I have had in view principally readers altogether ignorant of Latin, but wishing to know something of a writer lauded enthusiastically by all classical scholars: they will observe that I have not introduced into its pages a single Latin word. I have nourished also the hope that it might be serviceable to those who have forgotten, but would like to recover, the Horace which they learned at school; and to them I would venture to recommend the little copy of the Latin text with Conington's version attached, in "Bell's Pocket Classics." Latinless readers of course must read him in English or not at all. No translation can quite convey the cryptic charm of any original, whether poetry or prose. "Only a bishop," said Lord Chesterfield, "is improved by translation." But prose is far easier to render faithfully than verse; and I have said that either Conington's or Dean Wickham's version of the Satires and Epistles, which are both virtually in prose, will tell them what Horace said, and sometimes very nearly how he said it. On the Odes a host of English writers have experimented. Milton tried his hand on one, with a result reflecting neither Milton nor Horace. Dryden has shown what he could have done but would not do in his tantalising fragment of the Ode to Fortune. Pope transformed the later Ode to Venus into a purely English poem, with a gracefully artificial mechanism quite unlike the natural flow of the original. Marvell's noble "Horatian Ode," with its superb stanzas on the death of Charles I, shows what he might have achieved, but did not attempt. Francis' rendering of 1765 is generally respectable, and in default of a better was universally read and quoted by his contemporaries: once, in the Ode to Pyrrhus (III, xx) he attains singular grace of phrase and metre.