To the right honourable, the Lady Mary Cavendish, daughter of the most illustrious prince, James, Duke of Ormond, etc.

May it please your Ladyship,

What your most illustrious father has often seen (and as I have a little reason to hope, not without some delight) upon the stage in Ireland, I have adventured to expose to the press in England and cast under your Ladyship’s protection. Nor that I dare imagine the thing of that worth to deserve so noble a patroness and therefore confess it a very high presumption. Yet having hid the honour to be long a servant to your illustrious family and been made so abundantly sensible of their goodness and clemency, I can no way doubt but so excellent a branch of it must needs be supplied with those virtues in a proportion capable of pardoning much greater crimes.

I know Madam, that this play in itself is not at all calculated to the humour of the present times, the subject being too grave and the lines too modest; nor is it (to speak modishly) showily enough. Yet what makes it unfit for others, adapts it the more for your view, whose virtues are so great and whose judgment so clear, that as the first sway you against the present humour which delights the world, so the last defends you from being carried away only with vanity and show.

And the assurance I have of this, gives me the confidence to add that the contrivance (though it be but one single plot) is so neat and curious and the contest between love and nature maintained everywhere to that height, that I cannot doubt but you will find some divertissement in it, so far as Monsieur Quinault, whose it was in the Original, had a part in it and as for the English it speaks, I must wholly leave to your Ladyship’s judgment, with the same submission that I subscribe myself,

Madam,

Your Ladyship’s most humble and most obedient servant,

J. D.