INTRODUCTION

Summary

1. No phase in the ordinary experience of human life is more melancholy, than the spectacle of a scholar's breaking off abruptly work undertaken on a large scale and with a high purpose, by reason of the stroke of death, often of sudden death. It was thus that the historian Thucydides was hindered from completing his "possession for ever," by closing his narrative at the end of the twenty-first year of the Peloponnesian war, although that struggle was protracted for six years longer; nay more, by leaving his eighth book a mere rude sketch, after he had wrought the preceding seven to the most elaborate perfection. It was thus that Lord Macaulay, who had projected and made copious preparations for the History of England for a period of some hundred and twenty years, was taken from us before he had achieved more than a third part of his ambitious design. This calamity, one of the saddest incidents of our mortal lot, has fallen especially heavy upon the students of the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, whose field embraces labour so wide and varied, that no single life can hope to cover more than a small portion of it. Tischendorf, for example, was stricken down, almost in late middle age, in the midst of his zealous and happy researches, hardly leaving behind him an unpublished vestige of what he had discovered and expected to make known to the world.