To the right honourable, the lady Elizabeth Delaval.

Since your Ladyship has such great advantages of fortune in those particular blessings, wit and beauty, the best companions of quality, this trouble is no more than what in reason ought to be expected. For dedications are but little better than prologues and epilogues, the general subject of them is, to persecute the witty and the fair. Your Ladyship’s perfections give me an ample theme and your kindness to this poem gives me boldness to make use of it. But virtues in persons so nobly descended, are but things necessitated. Your Ladyship’s merits could not be less, since they are derived from such illustrious parents. The loyal earl of Newbrough, by his personal actions in the wars and his constant following the king’s fate beyond sea, made himself so considerable an enemy to the Rebellious Party, that they used all their arts and laid all the baits of interest to have made him their friend. But their impious cause and their slighted proffers appeared so detestable, that he proved his valour and fidelity equally impregnable. And to sum up his character, he was a person that made the field his temple, majesty his divinity and his life and fortunes, the sacrifices he offered. Nor were his heroic virtues unmatched in the famous lady Aubeny, whose industrious loyalty and more than female courage, rendered her so conspicuous, that, though success and victory were the rebels’ constant slaves and the spite of fate had made them continually prosperous, both in their councils and their arms. Yet such were her indefatigable services to the royal cause, as made her admired by the world and feared even by the invincible. Witness her imprisonment in the tower, from whence by a miraculous escape from her confinement and her threatened martyrdom, as she lived a champion for loyalty, she died an exile for it. Nor is your Ladyship less indebted to providence for your education than your birth, in the affinity and patronage of the lady Stanhope, a person of so much worth and honour, so truly generous and so excellently good. But my design is not that of a Herald, but a petitioner. The faithful shepherd begs acceptance and the better to obtain that favour, I may without a crime boast of some merit in the present I make, since it borrows its value from the esteemed Guarini. And I have one encouragement more to devote it here, knowing it has formerly been your Ladyship’s diversion. If I am censured by the admirers of Pastor Fido for being so bold with so received a poem, I only make this apology, that plays are so strictly tied up to fashion, that like costly habits, they are not be autiful without it. I confess I have taken a great deal of liberty in the characters of Sylvano and Corisca, because they were not kept up in the author. The first of which, in the translated Pastor Fido (for I am a stranger to the Italian) flagged in the second act and was wholly lost in the two last.

And the part of Dorinda was made up new to fit it for the person designed to act it. And the two last acts which have so little of the authors, have still his design, only that I have represented what was but narrative in the original. But whatever advantages I may have received from so famed a story and so good a foundation, my greatest is, the occasion it gives me of expressing myself,

Madam,

Your Ladyship’s most obedient and most devoted servant,

Elkanah Settle.