EDITOR'S POSTSCRIPT TO HIS PREFACE. In the first volume of this work it was stated that some detailed reference to the strictly new information contributed to it, and first made public by its Editor, would be prefixed to the third and last volume. The following sentences, therefore, are now subjoined. The discovery of Cowley's parentage, and a correction of all the received accounts of his birth, are here made; and his Will -hardly less beautiful or characteristic than one of his Essays -is printed for the first time. Concerning Milton (-it is difficult to glean over a field so well eared by earlier gleaners), the slight but not uninteresting fact that Marvell intended to have written his Life, is communicated here; and the dates of Sir John Denham's marriages have at length been made known. Here also the earliest public reference has been made to the will of Denham's father, and to the will of Waller's father, from both of which minutiae of importance have been drawn for the illustration of their lives. The date of Waller's marriage, and the period when Butler ceased to be steward at Ludlow Castle, were first set forth by me; and whoever will look into the Lives of Roscommon and Dryden will find much that is new. I have been careful in all cases to examine the wills, where such interesting documents exist, of the poets whose Lives have been written by Johnson; and the result of this examination, besides the discovery of Cowley's, is shown in some important references, not before made, to the wills of eight of Johnson's heroes, viz. Waller, Roscommon, Garth, Blackmore, Somervile, West, Hammond, and Akenside. |