Letter 4244

Cooke writes to Sloane about subscriptions for his edition of Terence in three volumes. He honors Sloane’s subscription. The first volume was completed, which its intent was to separte the true from the corrupt readings and to explain those words which are used by Terence in a sense different from what they were used in afterwords by writers of the Augustan Age and since. Cooke has been helped by the earl of Oxford and Dr. Mead’s Manuscripts and collections from there at Cambridge. He would like to have his work in the Library of a person who is so justly numbered among their promoters of Learning as Sloane does and since Sloane subscribed to his Translation of Hesiod, he hopes his Latin and English edition of Terence will have a place in the same Library. His servant waits with the first volume, the second ill be sent at Christmas week, and the third a month later. They are large twelves on a five paper. The subscriptions are half a Guinea. Thomas Cooke (1703-1756), known as ‘Hesiod’ Cooke, was a popular translator of the Classics and writer (Sidney Lee, ‘Cooke, Thomas (1703–1756)’, rev. Arthur Sherbo, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6180, accessed 20 Aug 2014]).