ΤΟ THE REV. WILLIAM FRENCH, D.D. MASTER OF JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, AND PREBENDARY OF ELY, AND TO THE REV. GEORGE SKINNER, M.A. FELLOW AND TUTOR OF JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, THE FOLLOWING TRANSLATION IS INSCRIBED, WITH EVERY SENTIMENT OF RESPECTFUL REGARD AND SINCERE GRATITUDE, BY THEIR OBLIGED AND VERY HUMBLE SERVANT, THE TRANSLATOR. TO THE REV. WILLIAM FRENCH, D.D. MASTER OF JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, AND PREBENDARY OF ELY. REVEREND SIR, INDEPENDENTLY of the great debt of gratitude which I owe to yourself and to your learned friend, the Rev. George Skinner, for the unvarying kindness and encouragement, which ever since my arrival in Cambridge, it has been my good fortune to experience in an equal degree from both of you, I am under peculiar obligations to you, Reverend Sir, for your extreme condescension in undertaking to examine the manuscript of this work, previous to its going to the press, not merely for the kind purpose of pruning it of its most striking foreign idioms, but also with the view of comparing it with the original, and of pointing out to me the passages where the translation might be made more literal than I, as a foreigner, first thought that the genius of your language would admit of. Love of truth, no less than gratitude, prompts me further to acknowledge, that your own translation of the first two Chapters of the Yad Hachazakah, executed by way of amuse ment during your last year's residence at Ely, widely opened my eyes to the possibility of rendering the translation far more literal than, on my first attempt, I had succeeded in making it, and induced me to remodel the work, not with the ambitious hope of imitating your English style (which I at once perceived to be altogether beyond my reach), but with the intention of imparting to my translation that character of a literal one, which it had not before I was favoured with a view of yours. Had you proceeded in your translation, and taken up the subject in good earnest, as I more than once took the liberty of suggesting both to yourself and to your learned friend the Rev. Mr. Skinner, and as at one time you both of you seemed not altogether indisposed to do, Maimonides would undoubtedly have appeared before the English public to much greater advantage than he does now. Other literary pursuits, however, have not allowed you to engage in this task; and it has been the lot of the sublime and immortal author of the Yad Hachazakah to be introduced to your countrymen by the feeble and trembling hand of a foreigner, altogether unable to invest him with that stateliness and grandeur, which so eminently distinguish him in his own Oriental garb. Though prompted either by zeal for the spread of Oriental literature, or a feeling of benevolence towards a stranger and a foreigner, or both, you were so condescending as to lend your hand to this work, as far as regards the correcting of the |