Ir has been deemed advisable to make a change in the arrangement of "The Annual Biography and Obituary." Hitherto the volume has usually consisted of four parts, viz. Memoirs of celebrated Individuals, recently deceased; An Analysis of Biographical Works; Neglected Biography; and a Biographical Index. This year the second and third of the above-mentioned parts have been designedly omitted, in order to allow a greater space for that which it is presumed has always formed the most attractive portion of the work, namely, Memoirs of celebrated Individuals, recently deceased.

The Editor of the present volume has great pleasure in acknowledging the important assistance which he has received, from various quarters, in preparing it for the press. Among those to whom he is indebted for aid, are some of the highest names in British literature. It will at once be seen that the entire Memoirs of Mr. Ricardo, Sir Henry Raeburn, and Mr. Shaw Lefevre, are from much more able pens than his own. The Memoirs of Mr. Kemble,

Mrs. Radcliffe, Mr. Bloomfield, Bishop Middleton, Mr. Nollekens, Dr. Jenner, the Earl of St. Vincent, Mr. Angerstein, Dr. Baillie, and Lord Glenbervie, have been enriched by many valuable private and orig al communications; for which the Editor begs leave to return his best thanks. He has likewise freely availed himself of all the information and remarks which he could meet with in other publications, whenever that information appeared to be authentic, and those remarks just; although it has seldom happened that he has not found it necessary to re-model what he has thus derived from general sources, to fit it for his particular purpose. To that able and copious work, "Marshall's Royal Naval Biography," his notices of naval men owe the greater part of whatever interesting matter they contain.

Although the loss of so many distinguished persons, whose death this work periodically records, is a just subject of private grief and public regret; yet the country, when she contemplates the constantly accumulating treasure of LIVING excellence in her possession, has the proud consolation of feeling that however large her annual expenditure of courage, learning, genius, and virtue, it is a deduction which she can afford, without injury to her secure and splendid capital. He must indeed be an inveterate laudator temporis acti, who, in our days, confines himself to the veneration due to the illustrious dead, and is insensible to the EXISTING claims to his admiration and respect, whether in arms, in arts, in letters, in science, or in all the benevolent and dignified qualities of human nature, which manifest themselves on every side, in cheering and honourable

TO

variety. One of the most beneficial tendencies of necrological reading, is, to teach us, while we lament that of which we have been deprived, To VALUE THAT WHICH WE RETAIN; and not churlishly to withhold the expression of our applause and gratitude, until those to whom the approbation of their contemporaries might yield a generous and welldeserved gratification, have become tenants of that cold and narrow dwelling, into which the voice of human praise or censure can never penetrate.