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BOHN'S CLASSICAL LIBRARY

LUCRETIUS

GEORGE BELL AND SONS LONDON: PORTUGAL ST., LINCOLN'S INN CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON, BELL & CO. NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. BOMBAY : A. H. WHEELER & CO.

ON THE NATURE OF THINGS

TRANSLATED BY

H. A. J. MUNRO

FORMERLY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY

J. D. DUFF

FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

LONDON
GEORGE BELL & SONS

1908

HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY

FROM THE LIBRARY OF
PROF. GEORGE F. SWAIN

OCT. 20, 1933

First Edition 1864. Second Edition 1866. Third Edition 1873.
Fourth Revised Edition 1886. Reprinted 1891, 1898, 1900.

1903.

First Printed in Bohn's Classical Library, 1908.

3/23
49-104
22

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.

INTRODUCTION

THE author of this Translation of Lucretius was a famous scholar and in many ways a memorable man. Though he died more than twenty years ago, no biography of him has ever been written; and this reprint offers a natural opportunity to give a short account of his life and character, which may interest those who read this book of his in years to come.

Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro was born at Elgin, in October, 1819. Both his father and his mother were Scotch; and he himself, though he habitually resided in England and retained no trace of the Scottish accent upon his tongue, remained to the last day of his life a fine representative of that perfervidum ingenium which has been supposed to be characteristic of Scotchmen. He was educated at Shrewsbury School, under the famous Dr. B. H. Kennedy, for whose teaching he always felt and expressed a strong sense of gratitude, and thence he passed on to Cambridge in 1838, and became a member of Trinity College. At Cambridge he won a Craven Scholarship and took his degree in 1842 as second in the Classical Tripos. Two years later he was elected a Fellow of Trinity; and from that date until his death, forty-one years later, he lived the life of a college Don at Cambridge.

His reputation as a scholar rests mainly on his

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