many instances scarcely exaggerated. This will be evident, I think, not only from the foot-notes I have appended, when immediate explanation appeared necessary, but in the Appendix, containing such additional information and remarks as would have incumbered the margin or interrupted the story.
I have only to add here, that while I have endeavoured to render the text as literally as the idioms of the two languages would admit, and spared no pains, where the passage was obscure or the expression obsolete, in attaining the nearest approach in my power to the sense of the author, (which has been frequently most ludicrously perverted by the "several hands" aforesaid,) I have left the proper names of the various personages untranslated, having come to that determination after much consideration, and in consequence of the great inconsistency and confusion of identity I found had resulted from the attempts to translate them by others.
The incidental verse, and the "moralités," as they are called, though unavoidably not so literally rendered as the prose, will, I trust, be found as true to the spirit of the original, and retaining the colour of the period in which it was composed,—the period of Lulli, in music; and in painting, of Watteau and Parterre.
