Excerpt from Daphnis and Chloe: A Pastoral Romance

It was Jacques Amyot, afterwards Bi hop of Auxerre and Grand Almoner of France, who first rendered Longus's storv into a living European language. Since his time fifty editions of the Greek text and as many editions of translations in various tongues, have issued from the press, testifying to the interest of the work for scholars, and to its popularity among readers in all parts of the civilized world. Amyot's version, first printed in 1559, and couched in quaint yet graceful French, long enjoyed a high reputation among men of letters. Based however upon an incomplete manuscript copy of the Greek text it was necessarily imperfect, and the same may be said of all the other translations that appeared prior to 1809. If The first Greek edition of the pastoral - still incom plete but containing various passages that did not appear in Amyot's work - was published at Florence in 1598 and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries numerous scholars of well-nigh every nationality in Europe occupied themselves in examining and comparing all the known manu script copies of the work, and in editing improved versions of the original text. Still none of these were perfect, the narrative being interrupted in the second book of the tale by a hiatus dcflemlus which it seemed impossible to supply. In 1809, however. Paul Louis Courier, whilst making some re searches in the Laurentian Library at Florence, discovered there a manuscript copy of the story, containing the verr passage which was deficient in all the other known versions, and the absence of which had for centuries excited the curi osity and baffled the learning of scholars. Courier's discovery caused a great stir in the world of letters, and many would have liked to verify it. But this did not prove practicable.

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