This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
12
PREFACE OF THE

these several classes find not only a pleasing and grateful variation, but a useful and edifying commentary, in the proper offices of particular saints. To select the proper hymns of Advent, of Christmas, of Lent, of Easter, and to pass by those of the great saints, whose offices, as arranged in the Breviary, relieve and diversify them—to translate every hymn and every sequence of the Pentecostal office, and to suppress altogether the noble hymns and sequences of the office of Corpus Christi—is to mutilate and deform instead of translating; it is to suppress the most essential and characteristic elements of the great design—to present the building without portico, or to leave the portico in solitary and unmeaning loneliness."

Mr. Caswall has avoided this fatal error. His collection comprises not only the hymns of Vespers, but those of Matins, Lauds, and the lesser hours, as well as the hymns of the common, and also the proper ones, both of the seasons and the saints, throughout the year; so as, by means of the table prefixed, to serve as a complete manual of devotional poetry for every day, and for all holydays, and saints' days, of the ecclesiastical year.

It has, therefore, been transferred entire and un-