The Eclogues of Virgil Translated into English Verse.

[Bath]: Printed for Private Distribution among Friends. [W. & F. Dawson, Printers, Market Place, Bath. 1868. FIRST AND ONLY EDITION. 8vo, 180 x 110 mms., pp [vi], 75 [76 blank], original maroon cloth, blocked in gilt on front cover, gilt spine. A very good to fine copy. These are the rare and surprisingly fine verse translations of Virgil's eclogues by Henry Duncan Skrine (1815-1901) of Warleigh Manor, Somerset. Skrine was educated at Wadham College in the University of Oxford, and an impressive number of his progeny became Oxonians themselves in due course: five are named in Alumni Oxonienses. It may say something of the quality of a nineteenth-century Oxonian education in classical language and literature that Skrine graduated B.A. in 1837, and published these dextrous translations of Virgil more than three decades later. Skrine's Eclogues of Virgil is such a rare book that COPAC finds no copies beyond BL and Oxbridge. OCLC adds UC Berkeley, Yale, Library of Congress, and University of Texas at Austin. An additional search in the online catalogues of all eight of the Ivy League libraries is futile: it turns up only the Yale copy already located by OCLC. There is also no copy in the extensive collection of nineteenth-century verse at UC Davis. Catherine W. Reilly had no entry on Henry Duncan Skrine in either volume of her survey of verse of the period: Mid-Victorian Poetry, 1860-1879: An Annotated Biobibliography (2000) and Late Victorian Poetry, 1880-1899: An Annotated Biobibliography (1994).