[From Manx Soc vol 32 - Prayer Book]

PREFACE.

MR. MOORE has written both a memoir of Bishop Phillips and a brief account of his MS. for this volume, so there hardly remains anything to be said in the preface. I may however mention, that the two Prayer-books, as now printed in parallel columns, would form a larger volume than it has been the custom of the Manx Society to issue. It has, accordingly, been deemed advisable to divide the work into two volumes, the first of which will be found to end most conveniently with the Commination Service, while the second will contain the text of the Psalms, followed by appendices, and an essay on the phonology of Manx Gaelic by the writer of these lines.

With regard to the English text of the Epistles and Gospels which we have appended to the Manx, it is but right to say that this is an exact transcript of the English revision of 1604, and that it forms, as we are led to understand, the only reprint of those portions probably in existence.

I wish to take this opportunity of referring to the part which Mr. Moore and I have respectively taken in the work. The whole labour of transcribing the MS. for the press and of collating the printed copy with the original has fallen upon Mr. Moore, my help having been confined to a collation of the first sheet of the older text. I may, however, state that I perused the sheets as they issued from the press, and that I plied Mr. Moore with a number of questions on their contents, which involved him in a repeated scrutiny of the original.

Let me, in conclusion, congratulate the Manx Society on having now made the earliest and longest MS. in the Manx language accessible to all. By so doing they have laid Celtic scholars under a lasting obligation, and hate set an example. worthy of being followed by many a more numerous society in Great Britain and Ireland.

JOHN RHYS.

OXFORD, 1893.