The assistance of my friends has supported me through the arduous and laborious task; and, feeling it a duty incumbent upon me to render my work as complete as possible, i flatter myself the candid Public will accept my labours with every allowance for inaccuracy or inelegance of style which may be found in it, and which writers of superior talents would not perhaps have submitted to supply. The alterations our language has undergone may here be traced; and the patrons of learning, in its several branches, with their titles, preferments, and honors exhibited, as far as i was furnished with proper materials; and by the Index some account may be collected of the works of many authors and translators published in this period. art. I might have continued this work beyond the term which Mr. Ames assigned to himself, and thus might have handed down to distant posterity the improvements of my contemporaries in this noble But the history of the mechanical part has been fully handled by Mr. Mores, in his History of Letter-Founders.* Mr. Nichols has supplied anecdotes of printers and booksellers, and therein of literature at large for the last half century, in his Memoirs of Mr. Bowyer,† the last of our learned printers. The infinity of tracts that swarmed from the press, charged with the pedantry or the politics of the 17th century, in the freedom of unlicensed printing, would surpass the compass of a common life to collect; and here i willingly submit to the censure of neglecting the present for the past. W. H. *We shall just observe here, that Mr. Mores was of opinion that W. de Worde was his own letter-founder; a circumstance that shews the quick improvement of the typographic art among us. HERBERT. [For some account of Rowe Mores's work, vide p. cxxi, post.] + A new edition of this amusing work is now in the press; and will be published in the ensuing Spring, 1810, in 5 vols. 8vo. D. |