Prefixed to the Edition published in 1836.
NEARLY twelve years have elapsed since the present edition was undertaken; and it affords me no small gratification to have at length accomplished, however imperfectly, a task which has been attended by a degree of labour proportioned to the difficulty of the work, and the competency of the workman. The delay, though not my own, and incurred in the hope of securing a corresponding advantage to my readers, cannot, I fear, be justified-and, when I consider how often plans have been defeated, assurances forfeited, and character thus sacrificed, by a spirit of procrastination, I cannot but rejoice that my own intentions have survived that which threatened their frustration, and that I have been permitted, though late, to redeem my pledge by the publication of these volumes.
Respecting the WORKS of Sir Thomas Browne, I need say the less here, because explanatory prefaces accompany the principal of them. Religio Medici, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, and the volume containing Hydriotaphia and the Garden of Cyrus, were published by himself; after his decease, and in consonance no doubt with his understood intentions, appeared the Miscellany Tracts, Letter to a Friend, Posthumous Works, and Christian Morals. The last of these, we are informed by his daughter,' was a continuation of his Religio Medici, drawn up in his elder years," and seems to have been left in readiness for the press. Of his lesser pieces he had probably intended to make a complete collection, and either to publish, or leave them for publication in a revised form; for he has informed us himself that he had " some miscellaneous tracts which might be published." The collection which was brought out by Abp. Tenison does not appear to me to have been so complete or so revised and arranged, as the author would have left it.
It will be expected that I should say a few words respecting
See last page of Supplementary Memoir, and Archdeacon Jeffery's Preface to the Christian Morals.