etched by Cross,
in his _History of Henry Fielding_, and may simply be summarized here.
The first edition, entitled _Ovid's Art of Love Paraphrased and
Adapted to the Present Time_ (or _Times_) was first issued in
February, 1747, and was advertised in the _Gentleman's_ and _Scots_
Magazines in that month. During March, further advertisements appeared
in the _London Magazine_ and the _St. James Evening Post_. The most
extensive notice ran, however, in Fielding's own _Jacobite Journal_
(No. 15), where it served as basis for a detailed comparison between
the art of love and the art of Jacobitism. Of this 1747 anonymous,
original edition no copy is known.

In 1759, the work was reissued in London and Dublin, under the title
_The Lover's Assistant_, and again in London in 1760. Meanwhile,
advertisements for the original edition, as by Henry Fielding, had
been run by the publisher, Andrew Millar, in 1754 and 1758. Inasmuch
as Millar apparently still had unsold sheets in 1758, the 1759 edition
may comprise these sheets with new title pages and prefatory matter
necessary because of Fielding's death in 1754. At any rate, the
"modern instances" referred to by the author of the 1759 Preface are
not too modern to have been written in 1747. There has been no reprint
since 1760.

The present text is printed from the 1760 edition, collated with a
copy of the 1759 issue. The Latin text, which in the original faces
the English, is omitted. Notes keyed by letters and asterisks appear
in the original; it will be noted that Fielding's notes combine
scholarly and facetious remarks; he frequently used footnotes for
comic effect, especially in the translation of the _Plutus_ of
Aristophanes in which he collaborated.

Literature affords few pleasures so satisfying as translations done by
those who are not only expert in the languages concerned, but who also
are of the same spirit as the authors they translate. Some examples
come readily to mind: Pope's Horace, Dryden's Juvenal and Persius,
Smollett's LeSage, Lang's _Aucassin and Nicolette_, and Pound's
translations from Provencal. Such a felicitous combination appears in
Henry Fielding's translation of Book I of Ovid's _Ars Amoris_.

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English
translators of the classics abounded, including Marlowe, Jonson,
Chapman and Sandys; Roscommon, Waller, Denham, Cowley and Dryden. By
1700, the major kinds of translation had been differentiated,
de