E-text prepared by Sankar Viswanathan, Delphine Lettau, Joseph Cooper,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles
Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles
Lawrence Clark Powell, Clark Memorial Library
W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan
Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington
Benjamin Boyce, Duke University
Louis Bredvold, University of Michigan
John Butt, University of Edinburgh
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
Ernest C. Mossner, University of Texas
James Sutherland, University College, London
H.T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles
Edna C. Davis, Clark Memorial Library
The publishing history of this translation has been sketched by Cross,in his History of Henry Fielding, and may simply be summarized here.The first edition, entitled Ovid's Art of Love Paraphrased andAdapted to the Present Time (or Times) was first issued inFebruary, 1747, and was advertised in the Gentleman's and ScotsMagazines in that month. During March, further advertisements appearedin the London Magazine and the St. James Evening Post. The mostextensive notice ran, however, in Fielding's own Jacobite Journal(No. 15), where it served as basis for a detailed comparison betweenthe art of love and the art of Jacobitism. Of this 1747 anonymous,original edition no copy is known.
In 1759, the work was reissued in London and Dublin, under the titleThe Lover's Assistant, and again in London in 1760. Meanwhile,advertisements for the original edition, as by Henry Fielding, hadbeen run by the publisher, Andrew Millar, in 1754 and 1758. Inasmuchas Millar apparently still had unsold sheets in 1758, the 1759 editionmay comprise these sheets with new title pages and prefatory matternecessary because of Fielding's death in 1754. At any rate, the"modern instances" referred to by the author of the 1759 Preface arenot too modern to have been written in 1747. There has been no reprintsince 1760.
The present text is printed from the 1760 edition, collated with acopy of the 1759 issue. The Latin text, which in the original facesthe English, is omitted. Notes keyed by letters and asterisks appearin the original; it will be noted that Fielding's notes combinescholarly and facetious remarks; he frequently used footnotes forcomic effect, especially in the translation of the Plutus ofAristophanes in which he collaborated.
Literature affords few pleasures so satisfying as translations done bythose who are not only expert in the languages concerned, but who alsoare of the same spirit