SIR,
I here present your Highness with the fruits of a very few leisure
hours, stolen from the short intervals of a world of business, and of
an employment quite alien from such amusements as this; the poor
production of that refuse of time which has lain heavy upon my hands
during a long prorogation of Parliament, a great dearth of foreign
news, and a tedious fit of rainy weather. For which, and other reasons,
it cannot choose extremely to deserve such a patronage as that of your
Highness, whose numberless virtues in so few years, make the world look
upon you as the future example to all princes. For although your
Highness is hardly got clear of infancy, yet has the universal learned
world already resolved upon appealing to your future dictates with the
lowest and most resigned submission, fate having decreed you sole
arbiter of the productions of human wit in this polite and most
accomplished age. Methinks the number of appellants were enough to
shock and startle any judge of a genius less unlimited than yours; but
in order to prevent such glorious trials, the person, it seems, to
whose care the education of your Highness is committed, has resolved,
as I am told, to keep you in almost an universal ignorance of our
studies, which it is your inherent birthright to inspect.
It is amazing to me that this person should have assurance, in the face
of the sun, to go about persuading your Highness that our age is almost
wholly illiterate and has hardly produced one writer upon any subject.
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