To the illustrious princess, Mary, duchess of Richmond and Lennox.

Madam,

This figurative star presented to your view (no sooner formed generally distinguishable to our horizon) becoming suddenly obscured by the eclipses of those greater lights, from whom essentially it should have had both influence and lustre, has moved concealed many years; till now, by the reflection of your affinitive eminence in virtue and beauty, it has presumed to assume a being more communicable. Reject not, Madam, the access hereof, because transacted to your hand by so despicable an introducer. It solely is your property, not only by the advantage of worth (in civil rights of honour and respect) your present, but by the advantage of similitude (in rule of dialect) your proper attribute. The pretended perfection of Astraea’s virtue and beauty entitled her to a celestial figure. The essential graces whereof in you shall really translate you to so transcendent a glory, that those refulgent lights are thereof but imperfect shadows. Those objects of true love figured in her so happily to encounter as perfect a subject, to receive their impressions and mutually communicate the like effects to the forming of one mysterious union, are visibly expressed in the admired, ravishing and harmonious agreement of your hymeneal amity. Astraea is figured to descend from noble progeny, who to avoid the military fury of deboarding multitudes (which passing frequently through Gaul, descended like an irresistible torrent on the Roman Empire) were constrained to betake them to the humble sanctuary of a pastoral condition. This circumstance will meet no trivial analogy in the eminence of your extraction and consequence of your present rural retreat. So that, with permission, may evidently be concluded, that in reference to your natural perfections, civil transactions or accidental occurrence, Astraea may in equity presume to be either your type, parallel, or character. Disdain not, Madam, her resemblance, in respect of the humility figured in her condition, since it is the perfectest and most proper note of her nobility, which (where divided) show the original of such ostentatious attributes (with what glorious titles soever illustrated) had but a reproachful acquisition. And although your virtues need no other monument but their own perfection to constitute their memory eternal, yet since fortune is the chiefest agitator in human occurrences, whose power is still exercised in opposition of such eminent faculties, your counterfeit in Astraea may happily outlast your marble epitaph or figure. If so, it solely is the crown and glory of his enterprise, whose vanity can aspire to no higher honour than to survive the malice of his fate in his unworthy ministry to your fame, under the title of

Your Grace’s humble servant,

Leo. Willan.