ADVERTISEMENT. THE author is sorry that illness and other similar causes have obliged him to delay the publication of the Second Part of this Life very much indeed beyond the time at which he had hoped that it might have appeared. He ought, perhaps, to add likewise, that it has been in part written under circumstances of a public and private nature, more or less disadvantageous towards the calm thought and continuous attention which are due to a subject so solemn as the Life of a Saint. He takes this opportunity of expressing his thanks to a writer in the Christian Remembrancer of July last, as well for the kind and considerate tone of his criticisms upon the former portion of this Life, as for his observations upon one or two historical matters, which the author will not fail to reconsider and reexamine in the event of another edition of the Life being published. While the sheets are passing through the press, the Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, has obligingly mentioned that in the Library of that Society are contained two manuscripts of the Gospels, said to have been sent by St. Gregory to St. Augustine, which the author regrets that time does not allow him to investigate. He has just heard also that there is a similar MS. in the Bodleian, which had escaped the notice of the kind friend to whose researches in that library he is so much indebted. The pressure under which this Part of the Life of St. Augustine has been necessarily completed, must also be urged as an apology for the omission of all minute reference to Gocelin's Narrative of his Translation. As that Treatise, however, extends to St. Augustine's immediate successors in the See of Canterbury, an opportunity of supplying the omission may, it is hoped, present itself in a future Number of the Series. |