Dir. Fletcher 4-1550 70381 THO LAST NOT LEAST IN LOVE GOD'S PROVIDENCE IS MY INHERITANCE TO THE Honourable Edmund Boyle, A Ccept, my dear EDMUND, of a trifle, in which I only bear the part of an editor. Such as it may be, receive it as a token of my affection; for indeed, my dear Son, no words can exprefs with how much tenderness, hope, anxiety, and paternal love, I am, now alas! your only Parent, Marlborough-ftreet, PREFA C E. A N honourable* Author, who in a just piece of criticism has exhibited so spirited a manner of writing, that he has given wit even to a dictionary, and vivacity to a catalogue of names, and has placed our royal and noble English writers in a more learned and eminent light than they have ever appeared before, having mentioned the Earl of Monmouth's Memoirs as a manuscript fit to be made public; in concurrence with his judgment, and from a defire to exhibit a new picture of Queen Elizabeth and King James I. the following Memoirs are fent into the * Horatio Walpole, youngest fon of Sir Robert Walpole, Knight of the Garter, afterwards Earl of Orford. world, with fuch explanatory notes to the obfcure and remarkable paffages, as may poffibly render those paffages more intelligible and efficacious than they would otherwife have been. Moft, if not all writers feem to imagine, that futurity- must be as well acquainted as they themselves are, with the times, customs, and manners, of which they write: and in points, that although apparently minute are really material, they give themfelves fo little trouble, that many of their works, for want of proper exactness and attention, fall under the dreaded curfe either of obfoleteness or oblivion. For example; when a noble houfe is extinct, the title is frequently given away to some distant family, no ways related to the former; this title is ftill carried on in hiftory, without inferting the change of the name: which trifling circumstance, to mention |