LONDON: PRINTED BY S. AND R BENTLEY, Dorset Street, Fleet Street. YORK vec LIBRARY Part 4 Lenox and Tiden foundations. 15050 PREFACE. To a new edition of a work that has received the approbation of the public for more than a century, and which still retains its popularity, it would be impertinent to prefix any recommendatory observations. The only superiority which the present impression claims, consists in the accuracy of the text, and in its typographical neatness: to the life of Hale, however, a correct list of his publications has been added. Few pieces of biography are so interesting as the Memoirs of Sir Matthew Hale and the Earl of Rochester. Their lives form a striking contrast, and are admirably calculated to enforce the lessons of the moralist. In Hale, we contemplate a man rising from obscurity to distinction by the exertion of his own talents; dignifying by his virtues the elevated station which he attained; and, from a firm reliance on the truths of Revelation, closing a long and honourable life without regret for the past, or fears for the future. In Rochester, a person born to the highest honours and possessed of a splendid fortune, disgracing the one and squandering the other, by a career of uninterrupted vice: a professed atheist, and the scoffer at every thing that is sacred and good; prostituting the finest talents to the worst purposes; and, with a mind as diseased as his body, terminating a short and disgraceful existence on a death-bed of agony and terror; an object of compassion to the virtuous,--a beacon to the profligate and wicked. The touching simplicity with which their stories are told by Bishop Burnet, accounts for the esteem in which they are held as compositions; whilst the practical inferences which he draws, the unaffected tone of piety that is every where conspicuous, and the fact, that he is not only the biographer of the unfortunate Rochester, but was the divine who |