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PREFACE.

THE taste for those collections which, under the title of Ana, form so conspicuous and so interesting a portion of French literature, is both of high antiquity, and wide extent. The same blending of moral apothegms, of critical remarks, of serious and comic anecdotes, of scientific or literary information, which distinguishes the French Ana, is to be traced, more or less modified by natural habits, and the state of human knowledge, in the Nasr Eddin, the Bassiri, and Teudai of the Turks and Arabians, in the Memorabilia of Plato and Xenophon, in the Enchiridion of Arrian, and in the Noctes Attica of Aulus Gellius. The Bons Mots of Cicero we know were compiled by no less a person than Julius Cæsar, while another collection of his good things, we are told by Quinctilian, was made by a freedman under the title, De Jocis Ciceronis. Quinctilian himself has favoured us with not a few specimens of the Roman Orator's jocular vein, from which

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