AN edition of Dr. Bentley's Correspondence was originally designed by his Right Reverend and Learned Biographer, the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. His Lordship, having been led by the claims of his important avocations to relinquish that undertaking, with great kindness and liberality transferred the documents, which he had collected for it, to the hands of the Reverend John Wordsworth, M.A., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who was engaged in carrying on the work with much assiduity, when he was taken away by an early death.

The present Editor, on whom, by a concurrence of circumstances, the duty of executing the above design has devolved, has attempted, he fears very imperfectly, to accomplish what his predecessors in it were so well qualified to perform.

He now proceeds to state the plan of this publication, and the materials of which it is composed; requesting permission to close this Preface with a brief Memoir of him whom he has immediately succeeded in this work, a brother made dearer to him by a similarity of pursuits at the same school, and at the same College, as well as at the same home.

The present volumes are designed to contain the whole of Dr. Bentley's extant Correspondence, with the exception of such letters as were published in his lifetime.