THE DRAMATIC WORKS OF JOHN DRYDEN WITH A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR BY SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART. EDITED BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY _VOL. I._ EDINBURGH: WILLIAM PATERSON _1882_ [Illustration: _M' John Dryden._] THE DRAMATIC WORKS OF JOHN DRYDEN EDITOR'S PREFACE. The best-edited book in the English language is, according to Southey, Wilkin's edition of Sir Thomas Browne. If Sir Walter Scott's "Dryden" cannot challenge this highest position, it certainly deserves the credit of being one of the best-edited books on a great scale in English, save in one particular,--the revision of the text. In reading it long ago, with no other object than to make acquaintance with Dryden; again, more recently and more minutely, for the purpose of a course of lectures which I was asked to deliver at the Royal Institution; and again, more recently and more minutely still, for the purposes of a monograph on the same subject in Mr. Morley's series of _English Men of Letters_, I have had tolerably ample opportunities of recognising its merits. It was therefore with pleasure that I found, on being consulted by the publisher of these volumes as to a re-issue of it, that Mr. Paterson was as averse as I was myself to any attempt to efface or to mutilate Scott's work. Neither the number, the order, nor the contents of Scott's eighteen volumes will be altered in any way. The task which I propose to myself is a sufficiently modest one, that of re-editing Scott's "Dryden," as--putting differences of ability out of question--he might have re-edited it himself had he been alive to-day; that is to say, to set right errors into which he fell either by inadvertence or deficiency of information, to correct the text in accordance with modern requirements, and to add the results of the students of Dryden during the last three quarters of a century in matter of text as well as of comment.