THIS edition of Bishop Wilson's Notes on the Bible is printed from the original manuscript, which is preserved in the Bodleian Library. The notes are contained in a quarto Bible, printed at Oxford in 1697, to the marginal references and readings of which Bishop Wilson frequently alludes. They are written in the margins, the fly-leaves, and on slips of paper; these are sometimes inserted between the leaves, sometimes attached to the leaf in the space between the two columns. Some of the slips have unfortunately been lost. The notes were first printed after the Bishop's death in three quarto volumes, in which, besides the authorised Version of the Bible, the variations of the different English translations were given. The work was sent out under the Editorship of the Rev. Clement Crutwell, and published by subscription at Bath, in the year 1785; it has never been reprinted. In that edition the notes were altered more or less throughout, by occasional additions, especially in the Psalms, by some omissions, by combining two or more notes in one, and by a general revision of the style, in which the plain, antique, and sometimes not strictly grammatical language of the Bishop was altered to bring it into accordance with the taste of the day. In cases where there is any reason to believe that the notes which are found in Crutwell's edition, and not in the Bodleian copy, had been originally in the Bible, but since lost from it, they have been retained in this edition, but printed between brackets [ ], to indicate that they cannot |