ABSTRACT
Date and publication. First published in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Fifteen Books. Translated by the most Eminent Hands, edited by Sir Samuel Garth (1717), where it immediately follows D.’s ‘Ceyx and Alcyone’, reprinted from Fables Ancient and Modern. In the table of Contents (sig. f2r) it is described as ‘by the same Hand’ as its predecessor. This is the sole evidence for D.’s authorship. The poem was regularly printed as D.’s by editors from Broughton onwards, but is relegated by Noyes to an appendix. In the light of Garth’s relationship with D., and of the fact that Garth’s collection was designed as a tribute to D. and a completion of D.’s own earlier plans for a new English Metamorphoses (see David Hopkins, RES n.s. xxxix (1988) 64–74), there seems no reason to doubt the attribution.
