Donne, and your friend Sir Henry Wotton, all reprinted. The two first were written under your roof; for which reason, if they were worth it, you might justly challenge a Dedication: and indeed, so you might of Dr. Donne's, and Sir Henry Wotton's; becaufe, if I had been fit for this undertaking, it would not have been by acquired learning or study, but by the advantage of forty years friendship, and thereby with hearing and discourfing with your Lordship, that hath enabled me to make the relation of these lives paffable (if they prove fo) in an eloquent and captious age.

And indeed, my Lord, though these relations be well-meant facrifices to the memory of these worthy men ; yet I have fo little confidence in my performance, that I beg pardon for superscribing your name to them; and defire all that know a The Life of Bishop Sanderson was not then written.

your

your Lordship, to apprehend this not as a Dedication, (at least, by which you receive any addition of honour,) but rather as an humble and a more public acknowledgment of your long continued and your now daily favours to,

TO THE READER.

THOUGH the feveral introductions to these several Lives have partly declared the reasons how, and why I undertook them; yet fince they are come to be reviewed, and augmented, and reprinted, and the four are now become one book; I defire leave to inform you that shall become my reader, that when I fometime look back upon my education and mean abilities, it is not without fome little wonder at myself, that I am come to be publicly in print. And though I have in thofe introductions declared fome of the accidental reasons that occafioned me to be fo, yet let me add this to what is there faid; that by my undertaking to collect fome notes for Sir Henry Wotton's writing the Life of Dr. Donne, and by Sir Henry's dying before he performed it, I became like those men that enter eafily into a law-fuit, or a quarrel, and having begun, cannot make a fair retreat and be

quiet, when they defire it.—And really, after fuch a manner, I became engaged into a neceffity of writing the Life of Dr. Donne, contrary to my firft intentions; and that begot a like neceffity of writing the Life of his and my ever-honoured friend, Sir Henry Wotton.

And having writ these two Lives, I lay quiet twenty years, without a thought of either troubling myself or others, by any new engagement in this kind; for I thought I knew my unfitnefs. But, about that time, Dr. Gauden (then Lord Bishop of Exeter) published the Life of Mr. Richard Hooker, (fo he called it,) with so many dangerous mistakes, both of him and his books, that difcourfing of them with his Grace, Gilbert, that now is Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, he enjoined me to examine some circumftances, and then rectify the Bifhop's mistakes, by giving the world a fuller and a truer account of Mr. Hooker and his books, than that Bishop had done; and I know I have done fo. And let me tell the reader, that till his Grace had laidthis injunction upon me, I could not admit a thought