THE DRAMATIC WORKS

OF

JOHN DRYDEN




EDITOR'S PREFACE.

The best-edited book in the English language is, according to Southey,
Wilkin's edition of Sir Thomas Browne. If Sir Walter Scott's "Dryden"
cannot challenge this highest position, it certainly deserves the credit
of being one of the best-edited books on a great scale in English, save
in one particular,--the revision of the text. In reading it long ago,
with no other object than to make acquaintance with Dryden; again, more
recently and more minutely, for the purpose of a course of lectures
which I was asked to deliver at the Royal Institution; and
again, more recently and more minutely still, for the purposes of a
monograph on the same subject in Mr. Morley's series of _English
Men of Letters_, I have had tolerably ample opportunities of
recognising its merits. It was therefore with pleasure that I found,
on being consulted by the publisher of these volumes as to a re-issue of
it, that Mr. Paterson was as averse as I was myself to any attempt to
efface or to mutilate Scott's work. Neither the number, the order, nor
the contents of Scott's eighteen volumes will be altered in any way. The
task which I propose to myself is a sufficiently modest one, that of