Book Description

Excerpt from The Life and Correspondence of William Connor Magee, Vol. 1 of 2: Archbishop of York, Bishop of Peterborough IN deference to the earnest wish of friends, the family of the late Archbishop of York, a year after his death, consented to the publication of his Life and Correspondence, and requested me, his oldest and most intimate friend, to undertake the work. I willingly consented, but domestic afflictions and my own subsequent illness suspended the work for nearly two years and caused a most un fortunate delay. I have attempted, as far as possible, to make this book an Autobiography, by letting the Archbishop tell the story of his own life and explain his own actions and opinions through his letters. There are, however, many gaps in the correspondence caused by our more frequent personal intercourse after I entered his diocese. These I have been obliged to fill with narrative of my own. This unique correspondence extends over a period of nearly 50 years, without a break, and I have preserved of it about 1200 letters, most of them of considerable length. I have given letters addressed to others in preference to those written to myself when ever they cover the same ground, as I shrank from publishing a correspondence in which, without inserting a single letter of my own, I and my affairs appeared so prominently; but I found it impossible to efface myself altogether without mangling and destroying the natural flow of the letters. To have left only his comments on public events and to have torn them from a context of a more domestic character, would have destroyed their charm and done injustice to the loving character of the writer. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.