At all events, after this undesigned support, I am the less inclined to retire from our vantage ground.
But it is gratifying on all accounts to say now, that such interpolations as in the companion volume I was obliged frequently to supply in order to fill up gaps in the several MSS.

and in integral portions of the treatise, which through their very frequency would have there made square brackets unpleasant to our readers, are not required so often in this part of the work.

Accordingly, except in instances of pure editing or in simple bringing up to date, my own additions or insertions have been so marked off.

It will doubtless afford great satisfaction to others as well as the admirers of the Dean to know what was really his own writing: and though some of the MSS., especially towards the end of the volume, were not left as he would have prepared them for the press if his life had been prolonged, yet much of the book will afford, on what he regarded as the chief study of his life, excellent examples of his style, so vigorously fresh and so happy in idiomatic and lucid expression.
But the Introduction, and Appendix II on 'Conflation' and the 'Neutral Text,' have been necessarily contributed by me.

I am anxious to invite attention particularly to the latter essay, because it has been composed upon request, and also because--unless it contains some extraordinary mistake--it exhibits to a degree which has amazed me the baselessness of Dr.Hort's theory.
The manner in which the Dean prepared piecemeal for his book, and the large number of fragments in which he left his materials, as has been detailed in the Preface to the former volume, have necessarily produced an amount of repetition which I deplore.