The author states this work is a somewhat elaborate and accurate treatise on the authors and history of English hymns. Duffield would not have his readers think him capable of imposing on their credulity which every sort of ill-grounded or sentimental tradition concerning the origin or the use of these hymns. And as this is in no sense either a work of fiction or of dead statistics, Duffield confined himself to the truth as he found it, and mainly restrained a desire to indulge in the comparison of texts and the history of alterations.