"To the Miscellanies now presented to the publick[1] little preface is necessary. The productions of Dean Swift will ever speak for themselves. The publisher has only to lament that the death of a literary friend, to whom he owes the communication of the greater part of this volume, has deprived him of that satisfactory elucidation the collection would otherwise have received; and to acknowledge the assistance of another friend, from whom he has had some valuable additions.
"Whenever a complete edition shall be formed of Swift's Writings, it must be by an accurate comparison of the seventeen volumes published by Mr. Sheridan, with the twenty-five volumes in the editions of Dr. Hawkesworth and Mr. Nichols. When that is done, the present volume will form an interesting part; and till then it may be considered either as an eighteenth volume of the one edition, or as a twenty-sixth of the other."
In the same year, 1789, seven letters from Dr. Swift, and nine from his housekeeper Mrs. Whiteway, appeared in a valuable publication, by the late George Monck Berkeley, esq. entitled, "Literary Relicks;" to which an Inquiry into the Life of Dean Swift is prefixed, which shall be duly noticed in the nineteenth volume of this collection.
The Gentleman's Magazine for the last twenty years has been an occasional storehouse, whence
- ↑ In this volume was inserted the Dean's "Ode to King William on his Successes in Ireland," which the present Editor had previously recovered, in 1780, in his "Select Collection of Poems."
