Produced by Tor Martin Kristiansen, Margo Romberg, Joseph Cooper and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY JOSEPH TRAPP THE PREFACE TO T H E Æ N E I S OF VIRGIL (_1718_) _Introduction by_ MALCOLM KELSALL PUBLICATION NUMBERS _214-215_ WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES _1982_ GENERAL EDITOR David Stuart Rodes, _University of California, Los Angeles_ EDITORS Charles L. Batten, _University of California, Los Angeles_ George Robert Guffey, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Maximillian E. Novak, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Thomas Wright, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ ADVISORY EDITORS Ralph Cohen, _University of Virginia_ William E. Conway, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ Vinton A. Dearing, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Arthur Friedman, _University of Chicago_ Louis A. Landa, _Princeton University_ Earl Miner, _Princeton University_ Samuel H. Monk, _University of Minnesota_ James Sutherland, _University College, London_ Robert Vosper, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ CORRESPONDING SECRETARY Beverly J. Onley, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Frances M. Reed, _University of California, Los Angeles_ INTRODUCTION Joseph Trapp's translation of the _Aeneid_ was first published in two volumes dated respectively 1718 and 1720. Its appearance coincided with his vacation of his chair as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, an office which he was the first to hold and to which he had been elected in 1708.[1] The translation may be seen both as a valediction to the University by one whose subsequent career was to be made through the paths of clerical controversy and as a claim for the attention and patronage of the great world. The dedicatee was William, Lord North and Grey, and the list of subscribers is rich with the names of lords temporal and spiritual, including the Lord Primate of Ireland (Thomas Lindsay), who took four sets. Addison, Arbuthnot, Berkeley, Thomas Sheridan, Tickell, Swift, Young, and Thomas Warton (who succeeded Trapp as Professor of Poetry) also subscribed, but not Pope, whose views on Homer, Trapp criticised and misquoted. The University of Oxford was generous in its support (Cambridge was less so). We have, thus, in Trapp's _Aeneid_ a translation of Virgil that was probably read by many of the important figures of the English Augustan cultural milieu. In turn, Trapp, writing with highest academic authority, offers in his Preface an important critical account of Virgil's epic.