In dealing with a subject so unusually difficult and so rarely edited I cannot hope to have escaped errors, but after submitting my views to repeated revision during four years, it seems better to publish them than to withhold from students help they so greatly need. Should this attempt meet with favour, I propose to edit after the same plan some others of the less known and less edited portions of Cicero's writings. It must be regarded as an experiment, for no English scholar of recent times has treated any portion of Cicero's philosophical works with quite the purpose which I have kept in view and have explained above. The present work will, I hope, prepare the way for an exhaustive edition either from my own or some more competent hand. I have striven to guide them to the best teaching of Madvig, on whose foundation every succeeding editor of Cicero must build. My experience as a teacher and examiner has proved to me that the students for whom this edition is intended have a far smaller acquaintance than they ought to have with the peculiarities and niceties of language which the best Latin writers display. I have therefore done my best to place before the reader the arguments for and against different readings in the most important places where the text is doubtful. The acceptance of results without a knowledge of the processes by which they are obtained is worthless for the purposes of education, which is thus made to rest on memory alone. The judgment was better cultivated when the student had to fight his way through bad texts to the author's meaning and to a mastery of the Latin tongue. If any apology be needed for discussing, even sparingly, in the notes, questions of textual criticism, I may say that I have done so from a conviction that the very excellence of the texts now in use is depriving a Classical training of a great deal of its old educational value. In a very few passages I have introduced emendations of my own, and that only where the conjecttires of other Editors seemed to me to depart too widely from the MSS. , published in 1825 at Copenhagen, but never, I believe, reprinted, and to Baiter's text in the edition of Cicero's works by himself and Kayser.
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