D. Ivnii Juvenalis et Auli Persii Flacci Satyre Cum Annotationibus Thomae Farnabii

Amstelodami, Apud Ioannem Lanssonium 1638. Small 12mo, 128 x 68 mms., pp. 189 [190 blank], engraved title-page, bound in later, 18th century calf, spine blind in compartments, with authors and title in gilt; front joint slightly rubbed, margins very closely trimmed, but a good copy with several provenances. The English scholar and grammarian Thomas Farnaby (1574/5–1647) fled to Spain at the age of 15, where he converted to Roman Catholocism. He returned to England in 1595 and made a reputation as a school teacher. ODNB records that "Farnaby's reputation thrived. According to J. T. Cliffe, he was '[p]erhaps the most celebrated private schoolmaster in England'. He was incorporated at Oxford in 1616 as 'M.A. Cambridge', and he was a minor canon at St Paul's in London from 1626 to 1629. Wood claimed that 'more Churchmen and Statesmen issued thence, than from any School taught by one man in England' (Wood, Ath. Oxon., 2.106). Other than Bramston, its pupils included the diplomat Sir Richard Fanshawe, courtier Thomas Henshawe, and the clergyman Henry Killigrew. The success of his establishment allowed Farnaby to devote himself to a long-held obsession: the systemization of the grammatical principles of classical Latin and Greek in print. Commencing with the satires of Juvenal and Persius (1612), he annotated many of the classical authors—Seneca, Martial, Lucan, Ovid, Virgil, and Terence—in a manner intended to render their works intelligible to schoolboys." OCLC finds only one copy of this imprint of 1638, in Lyon.