The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. With a Life of the Author

Excerpt

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.