1.  The poem has been compared with another version already on Gutenberg—­ (vngln10).  Where the two disagreed, this text was carefully re-checked to ensure the text and punctuation matched those on the scanned image.

2.  The following apparent errors in the source text were corrected: 

Poem Line 73 ‘bessings’ changed to blessings. 346 ‘manoeuvre’:  the oe ligature was split. 668 ‘goods’ changed to Gods. 692 full stop added to line end. 718 ‘father-confessor’:  hyphen added. 840 ‘their’ changed to there. 850 ‘reverened’ changed to reverend. 909 ‘spar’ changed to spars. 909 ‘tropcis’ changed to tropics. 1083 ‘rivre’ changed to river. 1256 ‘reecho’ changed to re-echo.

2.  Line 713 has been copied and inserted from vgln10.  This was missing in the book, but was referenced in the notes; the line numbering also showed a missing line between 710 and 715.

3.  No other (deliberate) changes have made to the poem.  There remain a number of minor word and punctuation differences between this and vngln10.

4.  Special characters.

A number of characters used in the notes to describe pronunciation do not exist in ASCII.  The following conventions have been used to represent them: 

[=a] ‘a’ + Macron; (’a’ with a horizontal line above). [=o] ‘o’ + Macron; (’o’ with a horizontal line above). [=e] ‘e’ + Macron; (’e’ with a horizontal line above).

[)a] ‘a’ with a curved line above — like horns. [)e] ‘e’ with a curved line above — like horns.

[.a] ‘a’ with a single dot above