In issuing a popular edition of this important and standard work, it may be well to recapitualate a few particulars regarding its distinguished author, who may be termed the national philologist of Scotland. The son of a Glasgow minister, he was born in 1759, and, in due course, educated at the university of that city, where he especially distinguished himself in linguistic and philological studies. At the age of twenty-two, he was licensed to the ministry, and became pastor of a church at Forfar, where he gained the thorough esteem and confidence of a full congregation through the faithful and able discharge of his clerical labours and duties. For sixteen years he continued his pastoral duties at Forfar, during which period he married the daughter of a neighbouring proprietor, who gladdened the course of his long life, and died only a year before his own decease.<br><br>During the period of his pastorate at Forfar, Mr. Jamieson became the author of no fewer than six publications, some of which excited much interest at the time. But none of them have lived in the same sense that some of his later works have done. Neither are any of his earlier productions of such a kind as one would expect to come from an enthusiastic, word-sifting antiquary. Among others of this period we find The Sorrows of Slavery: A Poem containing a Faithful Statement of Facts regarding the Slave Trade; as also Eternity: A Poem addressed to Free Thinkers and Philosophical Christians; there is also A Vindication of the Doctrine of Scripture, and of the Primitive Faith concerning the Divinity of Christ, in reply to Dr. Priestley; a work of a different nature, and which attained to great popularity, and ran through many editions, was the one entitled Sermons on the Heart. By these and similar labours, Jamieson won for himself an honourable name in the field of literature.