![]() "It really has captured people's imaginations," said Hurst. ![]() So staff decided to ask the public for help. "It means, roughly, 'why did my tears please you more, my Philomel?', and Philomela is another name for a nightingale." The book's author, meanwhile, is "Nightlark", she pointed out. "We naturally thought the Latin quotation would be a huge clue it's not a quote from anything," said Hurst. The only evidence for the book's existence the OED could find was an entry in a bookseller's catalogue, which includes the description: "Written and published by a well-known connoisseur with the epigraph 'Cur potius lacrimae tibi mi Philomela placebant?'" ![]() "We're not usually completely floored, but this time we're stumped." "That turned into half an hour, and I was no further along the line to solving it – I looked on Google Books, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in short I looked everywhere I could think of and couldn't come up with anything," said Hurst.
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