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is destined to convey both pleasure and profit to many, for whose profit and whose pleasure he labours with delight;-that he is thereby doing some service to the literature of his country, to the intellectual and religious interests of his contemporaries, and even to the great cause of Christianity itself.

London, Feb. 24, 1836.

R. C.

NOTE. The reader will observe, that some of the poems in this volume are of earlier date than the beginning of the Seventeenth Century. As the Editor could not persuade himself to exclude Spenser and Davies from the former volume, on account of their not falling literally within the period prescribed in the title, so has he in this allowed himself the like liberty, in regard to Gascoigne and Southwell. In fact, by the "Seventeenth Century," he wishes to indicate rather a great era in our literature, beginning and ending, respectively, about the commencement and the close of that century, than the precise period of one hundred years. A similar inaccuracy—a very pardonable one, it is hopedwill likewise be found in the next, or third volume of Select Sacred Poetry, hereafter to be published; which, though appropriated to the first half of the Eighteenth Century, will commence with specimens from several writers who flourished towards the end of the Seventeenth, but for whom no room could be found on the present occasion.

The reader is requested to correct with his pen an error in the former volume, in consequence of which, through a false association of ideas, the Editor inadvertently stated the reverse of what he designed. In the short notice of the poet WITHER, instead of his sufferings "in the cause of the Church and Monarchy," it should have been, "for his opposition to the Church and Monarchy."

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