ADVERTISEMENT. THE industry of Dr. Grey, assisted by the communications of Bishop Warburton, and other learned Friends, has brought together such a variety of curious and interesting matter, illustrative of the sense and allusions of HUDIBRAS, as to leave to succeeding Editors little more than the humble, but by no means unimportant task, of revision and correction. In the present edition, the whole of Dr. Grey's Annotations have been preserved, devested of the numberless inaccuracies and typographical errors, by which they have been hitherto disfigured: the text has been collated with the earliest copies, and many false readings discovered and corrected. Occasional observations have been added, where the allusions of BUTLER appeared to be misunderstood, or imperfectly elucidated. The publication, by Thyer, of our Author's Genuine Remains, has opened a source of information to the commentator not possessed by Dr. Grey, who has unsuspectingly introduced in his notes many passages from a publication of commonplace ribaldry, professing to be the Posthumous Works of Butler, but containing only three of his productions,-the Ode on Du Vall, Case of Charles I. and Letters of Audland and Prynne. The Doctor's quotations from this collection have been retained, but care has been taken to distinguish them as spurious. The extreme scarcity of Towneley's admirable French version of HUDIBRAS, having confined it to the libraries of the curious, some specimens of it may not be unacceptable to the general Reader. |