PILGRIM'S PROGRESS FROM THIS WORLD TO THAT WHICH IS TO COME. DELIVERED UNDER THE SIMILITUDE OF A DREA M. WHEREIN IS DISCOVERED, THE MANNER of his SETTING OUT; HIS DANGEROUS JOURNEY, AND SAFE ARRIVAL AT THE DESIRED COUNTRY, ACCURATELY PRINTED FROM THE FIRST EDITION, WITH NOTICES OF ALL THE SUBSEQUENT ADVERTISEMENT. AFTER twelve months' labour, attended with an anxious wish to do justice to our great pilgrim forefather, John Bunyan, and his wondrous Pilgrimage, this volume is submitted, with respectful deference, to the judgment of the members of the Hanserd Knollys Society. A correspondence with the late Mr. Southey, when he undertook a similar task, led me to expect great difficulties; an expectation which has been fully realized. He thus expressed himself in a letter addressed to Mr. Major, dated Keswick, 21st March, 1829.1 "It has put me upon a careful collation of the text, and I do not repent of the unexpected labour which has been thus occasioned, as it will be the means of presenting the work in Bunyan's own vigorous vernacular English, which has been greatly corrupted in the easiest and worst of all ways-that of compositors and correctors following inadvertently their own mode of speech. The copy of Heptinstall's edition has been of use in that collation; and sometimes in the one which goes to press, corrupt as it is, I have found a better reading than in the folio. These are minute pains of which the public will know nothing, but of which a few readers will feel the worth. A correct text has appeared to me (who, both as a verseman and a proseman, am a weigher of words and sentences) of so much consequence since I undertook the collation, that I should like to correct the proofs myself." Mr. Major informs us that "every proof-sheet was transmitted to Mr. Southey at Keswick, and the modern printer, whom he lately heard exulting in the beauty of a large-paper bound copy, now mellowed and glossy with comparative age, was as happy in minutely following his 'copy' as former mar-texts seem to have been in perpetuating, if not engendering, the foulest errors. 1 Gentleman's Magazine, July, 1844. |