John Whitaker (historian)

"The reader must not expect in this work merely the private uninteresting history of a single town. He may expect whatever curious particulars can with any propriety be connected with it. [...] Nor must the general disquisitions and the general narratives of the prefent work be ever confidered as actually digressionary in their natures, and as merely useful in their notices. They are all united with the rest, and form proper parts of the whole. They have fome of them a necessary connexion with the history of Manchester. They have many of them an intimate relation, they have all of them a natural affinity, to it. And the author has endeavoured, by a judicious distribution of them through the work, to prevent that difgusting uniformity, and to take off that uninteresting locality, which must necessarily result from the merely barren and private annals of a town. He has thus in some measure adopted the elegant principles of modern gardening. He has thrown down the close hedges and the high walls that have hitherto confined the antiquarians of our towns in their views. He has called in the scenes of the neighbouring country to his aid, and has happily combined them into his own plan. He has drawn off the attention to the history of Manchester before it became languid and exhausted, by fetching in some objects from the county at large, or by presenting some view of the national history. But he has been cautious of multiplying objects in the wantonness of refinement, and of distracting the attention with a confused variety. He has always considered the history of Manchester as the great fixed point, as the enlivening center, of all his excursions. Every opening is therefore made to carry an actual reference, either mediate or immediate, to the reregular history of Manerester. And every visto is employed only for the useful purpose of breaking the stiff straight lines, of lighting up the dark, of heightening the little, and colouring over the lifeless, in the regular history of Manchester."