retain my own positive rank, intellectual and moral, it would please me to see my whole species on an elevation above ine: since, actuated by an ambition the very reverse of Cæsar's, I would rather be the last of an angelic community than the first of a human.

With respect to Mr. Hayley, I may perhaps be arraigned of ingratitude or deficient taste, when I express a wish that he had obliged me by a total forgetfulness of my very name; and had reserved the whole impression of his praise, in its unbroken integrity, for Messrs. Cowper, Langhorne, Stockdale, Sterling, and Todd. With no peculiar abstinence to boast in my appetite for praise, I am contented with that portion of it which has been adjudged to me: and I may candidly confess that, while it has satisfied my desire, it has very far exceeded my desert. To adduce all the eminent names of those, who have indulged me with their applause, would expose me to the suspicion of a vanity, of which I am unconscious: but I must say that, if I have not been so fortunate as to obtain the

favour of Mr. Hayley, I have experienced some degree of consolation under the humiliating circumstance, from the very partial regard with which this Life of Milton has been honoured by a WILLIAM GIFFORD, a SAMUEL PARR, and a CHARLES Fox. To the last my voice cannot now reach; and to the first I have already imperfectly expressed my sense of obligation: but Doctor Parr must forgive me if I here state that the benefit, which this edition of my work has derived from the assistance of his judgment, has been so considerable as to give him a just claim to the thanks of my readers and myself. In a correspondence, which has passed between us, his deep and accurate erudition has supplied me with so many curious observations on the subject of Milton's Latin poetry that, if I could consent to arrogate the possessions of a friend for my own and to shine with the wealth of another, I could now make a splendid figure, and appear to be great beyond the design of my nature or the indulgence of my fortune,

The high reputation of Dr. Parr for learning and for talents cannot acquire a line of additional elevation from my panegyric; and when I affirm that his virtucs as a man are equal to his merits as a scholar and a writer, I say only what his friends know to be true and what his enemies have not the confidence to deny. I speak of him on this occasion only to gratify myself, and he must pardon my justifiable vanity-for

"Nec Phobo gratior ulla

Quam sibi quæ Vari præscripsit pagina nomen."

Before I conclude, I must profess my thankfulness to the Reverend Doctor Disney, of the Hyde, for his very obliging communication of the fine drawing, which has supplied my work with its valuable frontispiece; and to the Reverend Mr. Matthews, Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, for the kindness with which he has enabled me to gratify the curiosity of my readers with a most curious fac-simile of Milton's hand-writing.

The drawing by Cipriani, from which my

frontispiece is engraved, is of a bust, in the possession of Dr. Disney, which was modelled from my author immediately after he had completed his " Defence of the People of England;" and the fac-simile is of the writing of that great man, in a volume of his poems, published in 1645, which he presented to Rouse, the librarian of the Bodleian, and which is now preserved in that grand repository of the literature of ages.

MAY 11, 1809.

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