OF

SENECA'S WRITINGS.

It appears that our author had, among the ancients, three

professed enemies. In the first place, Caligula, who called his writings—sand without lime; alluding to the starts of his fancy, and the incoherence of his sentences. But Seneca was never the worse for the censure of a person that propounded even the suppression of Homer himself; and of casting Virgil and Livy out of all public libraries. The next was Fabius, who tasks him for being too bold with the eloquence of former times, and failing in that point himself; and likewise for being too quaint and finical in his expressions: which Tacitus imputes, in part, to the freedom of his own particular inclination, and partly to the humour of the times. He is also charged by Fabius as no profound philosopher: but with all this, he allows him to be a man very studious and learned, of great wit and invention, and well read in all sorts of literature, a severe reprover of vice, most divinely sententious, and well worth the reading, if it were only for his morals; adding, that if his judgment had been answerable to his wit, it had been much the more for his reputation, but he wrote whatever

PRINTED BY J. CUNDEE, IVY LANE,

FOR T. HURST, PATERNOSTER ROW;
T. Gibbons, and C. Smith, Bath; T. Richards, Plymouth; J. and E.
Upham, Exeter; J. Dingle, and J. Deck, Bury; T. Combe,
Leicester; C. Woodward, Liverpool;

and A. Bothamley, Leeds.

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ADVERTISEMENT.

IN this enlightened age, when every day brings forth something new on the subject of education and morality, it is matter of considerable surprise, that writings of such intrinsic value as the present should so long have lain dormant. The talents of Seneca ere justly estimated by his contemporaries, and long after his decease; and as modern times cannot boast of similar works of superior merit, the proprietors, anxious to restore to society every thing valuable and essential to the interests of the present generation, have been induced to bring forward a NEW, being the SIXTEENTH edition, of Seneca's Morals, differing only from the former editions in some arrangements relative to the typographic department, particularly in affixing to the head of each page a new title, which, they trust, will be considered not only as a matter of improvement, but of utility; as the head-lines will, in a great measure, guide the reader in finding out whatever subject he may want. How far they have claim to the encouragement of an impar