After so many writers of biography have incurred the charge either of uninteresting generality, or of tedious prolixity, it would betray great arrogance were I to presume that I had approached the due medium. I have particularly felt the difficulty, in writing the life of a public character, of observing the line which divides biography from general history. { x} Desirous of giving unity to the narrative, and at the same time anxious to convey information respecting the ecclesiastical and literary history of the period, I have separated a number of facts and illustrations of this description, and placed them in notes at the end of the Life. I am not without apprehensions that I may have exceeded in the number or length of these notes, and that some readers may think, that, in attempting to relieve one part of the work, I have overloaded another.
No apology will, I trust, be deemed necessary for the freedom with which I have expressed my sentiments on the public questions which naturally occurred in the course of the narrative. Some of these are at variance with opinions which are popular in the present age; but it does not follow from this that they are false, or that they should have been suppressed. I have not become the indiscriminate panegyrist of the Reformer, nor have I concealed or thrown into shade his faults; but, on the other hand, the apprehension of incurring these charges has not deterred me from vindicating him wherever I considered his conduct to be justifiable, or from apologizing for him against uncandid and exaggerated censures. The attacks which have been made on his { xi} character from so many quarters, and the attempts to wound the Reformation through him, must be my excuse for having so often adopted the language of apology.
In the Appendix, I have inserted a number of Knox’s letters, and other papers relative to that period, none of which, as far as I know, have formerly been published. Several others, intended for insertion in the same place, have been kept back, as the work has swelled to a greater size than was expected. A very scarce Poem, written in commendation of the Reformer, and published in the year after his death, is reprinted in the Supplement.