PREFACE.

[By LORD CHESTERFIELD.]

TH

HE following Elegies were wrote by a young gentleman lately dead, and justly lamented.

As he had never declared his intentions concerning their publication, a friend of his, into whofe hands they fell, determined to publish them, in the perfuafion that they would neither be unwelcome to the Publick, nor injurious to the memory of their Author. The reader muft decide, whether this determination was the refult of juft judgement, or partial friendship; for the Editor feels, and avows fo much of the latter, that he gives up all pretenfions to the former.

The Author composed them ten years ago, before he was two and twenty years old; an age when fancy and imagination commonly riot, at the expence of judgement and correctnefs, neither of which feem wanting here. But fincere in his love as in his friendship, he wrote to his miftreffes, as he fpoke to his friends, nothing but the true genuine fentiments of his heart; he fate down to write. what he thought, not to think what he should write; it was nature and fentiment only that dictated to a real miftrefs, not youthful and poetic fancy, to an imaginary one. Elegy therefore speaks here her own, proper, native language, the unaffected plaintive

plaintive language of the tender paffions; the true elegiac dignity and fimplicity are preserved, and united, the one without pride, the other without meanness. Tibullus feems to have been the model our Author judiciously preferred to Ovid; the former writing directly from the heart, to the heart; the latter too often yielding and addreffing himself to the imagination.

The undiffipated youth of the Author, allowed him time to apply himself to the best masters, the antients, and his parts enabled him to make the best ufe of them; for upon those great models of folid fenfe and virtue, he formed not only his genius, but his heart, both well prepared by nature to adopt, and adorn the resemblance. He admired that juftnefs, that noble fimplicity of thought and expreffion, which have distinguished, and preserved their writings to this day; but he revered that love of their country, that contémpt of riches, that facredness of friendship, and all thofe heroic and focial virtues, which marked them out as the objects of the veneration, though not the imitation, of fucceeding ages; and he looked back with a kind of religious awe and delight, upon those glorious and happy times of Greece and Rome, when wisdom, virtue, and liberty formed the only triumvirates, ere luxury invited corruption to taint, or corruption introduced flavery to deftroy, all public and private virtues. In thefe sentiments he lived, and would have lived, even in thefe times; in these fentiments he died-but in these times too-Ut non erepta a diis immortalibus vita, fed donata mors effe videatur.