Synopsis
Excerpt from Gradus Ad Parnassum: A New Edition, Thoroughly Revised and Corrected, With the Addition of Many New Words, and in Which the English Meanings Are Now First Introduced
To this point also tends the third great alteration, which con sists in having expunged from the pages of the Gradus, whether as principal words, or as synonyms and epithets, a number of words which are not to be found in the productions of any Romanwréter whose works are now held by the scholar as classical authority, and which words indeed never came into usefill the decline of the language, and consequently ought carefully to be avoided in poetical composition, the object of which seems to be the combining of elegance of sentiment with purity of diction, and by that means approaching as nearly as possible 90 the finished models left by the classic poets of Rome. In doing this, however, it by no means escaped notice that former editions, if redundant in one class of words, were deficient in another, and several hundreds of words, almost the whole of which are used by Virgil and Ovid, and including many of the most elegant and poetical in the language, have now for the first time been inserted.
The chief alteration which remains to be noticed relates to the synonyms and epithets: the former have been diminished in number by striking out objectionable words, and so classified as to render the mistakes which were continually occurring to stu dents under the old system, unlikely, without great negligence, to occur under the present; while the epithets, which formerly offered a mass of absurdities to the notice of the scholar and the critic, and were more stumbling blocks in the way of the indus trions student, have been weeded of all that were likely to lead to error, and arranged with reference to their meanings and con nexion with their principal words; so that it is hoped that for the future they will be an advantage to the diligent, instead of a snare to the incautious.
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