Imatges de pàgina
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PREFACE.

THE present work is an Ana of Curiosities in Ecclesiastical Literature. No branch of Study more abounds with theia, and yet no Editor has taken. the pains to assemble them in a popular manner. The result is, a parlour-window, bock on subjects strictly theological, without the gravity of method, and the abstractions which characterize works adapted to the clerical library.

The object has been to render the English readers more familiar than they have hitherto been, with the prominent facts in Ecclesiastical History and Biography. Works on those subjects are deemed part of the regular course of reading of every young divine, yet as they cannot be me

thodically studied, much curious matter connected with Theological History escapes the attention which it merits.

At the same time the Curiosities of Ecclesiastical Literature are scattered through a multitude of works, and many of them are only to be found in Manuscripts, or in early printed books, or in works printed in foreign Languages, or in authors now become unfashionable or obsolete. Several years research among such musty authorities, with constant reference to the same object, has produced the present work. Many folios have often been ransackett for as many articles, and the Editor could not have fulfilled his intentions, but for his free access to the treasures of the Bodleian, the British Museum, and some other Public Libraries in Great Britain.

A long residence on the continent enabled him also, with the same purpose, to glean largely in the Vatican Library, the Ambrosian Library, and the Royal Library at Paris; and he has thus assembled facts not generally known, but which will be found at once curious and interesting.

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