Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/15

 clarity and finish of that MS. lightened a laborious, if fascinating, task.

What the book owed in its final stages to Mr. Rees will be plain from what is said above. I must also make acknowledgement, which Farquharson himself would have made more fittingly, to Mr. E. C. Marchant, Fellow of Lincoln College, to whose judgement he referred almost every part of his work from its earliest to its latest stages, and whose scholarship Mr. Rees and I have accepted in cases of doubt as a final arbiter. Our thanks are also due to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press for pushing on the publication of the book in spite of many competing war-time claims upon the Press.

I cannot conclude this Preface without recording two debts which Farquharson himself would not, I think, have passed over in silence—debts to two who were in different senses his companions throughout the work: one, to his wife, whose pure taste and deep sympathy were for him unfailing resources; the other, to his precursor Thomas Gataker, for whom he habitually expressed an admiration and a reverence second only to his admiration and reverence for 'the Emperor' himself.

JOHN SPARROW.

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