"Those studying the Latinity of Samuel Johnson need no introduction to the work of Niall Rudd. . . . The emininent classicist, however, is characteristically unassuming about his work. . . . Rudd is also too modest when he claims to have done little in the The Latin Poems : to emend the text where necessary, to translate 'fairly literally' ... Read morefor readers with little or no Latin, and to explain the occasional stylistic obscurity and 'more relevant classical allusions.' This approach makes for an austere book, especially when compared with Barry Baldwin's larger edition of Johnson's Latin and Greek poems. But the slimness of this book masks its substantive achievements. It might seem that an edition of the Latin poems, like the two volumes reviewed above, would necessarily be aimed at a rarefied audience. Instead, Rudd has made these poems accessible to the specialist and the common reader alike."
Christopher Vilmar
The Cambridge Quarterly
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