fully persuaded, that there cannot be a more serious impediment to the final discovery, or even to the free investigation of the true meaning of holy writ, than the pruriency of conjecturalemendation; or, what in its effect is almost equally pernicious, the proneness to admit various readings into the text on slender and inadequate grounds. So little also have I been disposed to stray from our English version, that I have entitled the translation prefixed to my commentary, not a new, but a corrected one*. For although I would not follow with servile timidity, I could not allow myself lightly, and, as I feel, irreverently, to desert that pattern of general excellence, which, if all its real errors were corrected, its deficiencies supplied, and every needful improvement made, would still, as a whole, remain little affected by the changes, that would be thus introduced.

It will appear in some parts of the following pages, that I am accustomed to pay a degree of deference, at least of attention, to the vowel

* It will be found that the version given in my commen. tary does not always exactly agree with the text of my translation. But the differences are not numerous, nor are they important as to the meaning. Some of them are the consequences of an alteration in my intention, which originally was to print the whole translation in the form of prose, without any regard to a metrical arrangement of the poetical parts, Others are faults, quas incuria fudit, and which, as such, I intreat the reader to pardon.

points. At the same time, I am not to be reckoned with those, whom Bishop Horsley, with somewhat too much of contempt, stigmatizes, as "worshippers of the Masorites." Their system of punctuation bears evident marks of having been formed and settled at a period long after the decease of the latest of the inspired penmen, and of having been contrived, if not merely, yet chiefly, for the purpose of forming a perpetual commentary on the sacred volume, which it limits and binds down by such numerous and complicated, such firm and positive rules, as could never have been fastened on any book written in a living tongue. Yet is it the work of successive generations of studious men, who were accurately skilled in the Hebrew language, who diligently weighed the force of every word, who preserved many valuable traditions of the sense, in which some less common forms of speech were used, and some difficult passages understood, in times long anterior to the schools of Tiberias, and who have handed down to us, taken at the lowest estimation and with all its defects, an highly valuable commentary on the old testament; to which even those, who most affect to despise it, are under no slight obligations. As such I willingly receive it: but far from being bound by the indissoluble chain of tradition, or hemmed in by the insurmountable

hedge of the law*, I have made no scruple of deserting its guidance, whenever I have seemed to detect error, or to discern the means of correction and improvement; I have expatiated, so to speak, "in the liberty, with which Christ hath made me free."

Archbishop Newcome and Dr. Blaney have arranged a considerable portion of the vision in the form of metre. Therein I have followed them, notwithstanding the opinion of Bishop Horsley, that in the prophets "the attempt is too much for modern criticismt." But upon this subject I desire to refer the reader to the work of Bishop Jebb on "Sacred Literature‡; work, which, if it could need any praise of mine, I should commend, as not less elegant and entertaining, than ingenious and learned. I have also printed in a metrical form some passages, which both Archbishop Newcome and Dr. Blaney have regarded as prose, and some, in which the latter has not followed his predecessor. In those texts I consider the poetical character and metrical structure of the lines to be plainly dis

*The Masora is called by learned Jews, the hedge of the law; and some derive the word itself from 8, to bind, or enchain, the Aleph being dropped in contraction. Buxtorfii Tiberias, cap. 1.

† Preface to Hosea, p. 44. The Bishop is however inclined to except Isaiah.

See particularly p. 83.

cernible; and they also form parts of oracular declarations, which throughout the vision appear to me to be delivered in the language of poetry; except only, that the tenth, eleventh, and fourteenth verses of the sixth chapter, where the other parts of the oracle require a metrical arrangement, are in prose. But the subject matter of the divine communication is there so truly prosaic, consisting merely in the designation of individuals, by their families and proper names, to a particular office, that it could hardly be adapted to a form of poetry, which does not shew itself in measure properly so called.

The following particulars, briefly explaining the origin, principle, and intention of the volume, may interest the reader, and throw light on some portions of it.

About eighteen months ago, being much engaged in the study of the Revelation of St. John, I found it necessary to enter into a close comparison of several of its figures, with those described in the vision of Zechariah. By such compa rison I was soon convinced, that the strong similarity, which subsists between the two Apocalypses, for so I venture to call the one, as well as the other, is not the adventitious result of like subjects falling under like emblems, as like ideas into like modes of expression, but the calculated effect of design studiously connecting

them by such strong marks of conformity, as might, consistently with the different times and circumstances, in which they were delivered, point out their mutual intelligence and general intercommunity. Hence I was induced to lay aside. my labours on the mystic scenes exhibited to the prophetic apostle, until I had more fully investigated those recorded by the evangelical prophet.

I did not indeed approach the subject without an opinion previously formed, though not decidedly fixed, as to the interpretation of one important part of the vision*, in which opinion my subsequent enquiries have produced little alteration; but neither did I approach it without a deliberate and steadfast determination to reject every insulated exposition, however fairly it might seem to quadrate with any particular emblem, if it refused to form a link in one regular and consistent chain of interpretation from the beginning to the end of the vision, according to the principles laid down in the introduction to the commentary on the sixth part. Farther than this I was absolutely unfettered by any general or partial opinion, having already discarded, for guides, all the commentaries I had read, as irreducible to the standard just mentioned.

* I allude to the commentary on the fifth part; a portion of which formed the substance of a visitation sermon, preached in the year 1817.