To the right honourable, the Lady Henrietta Wentworth, baroness of Nettlestead.

Madam,

I ought to beg your Ladyship’s pardon, when I lay so inconsiderable a trifle as a play at your Ladyship’s feet, the access to so much divinity being that difficult awful blessing that nothing mean or unhallowed should dare to aspire to. Yet greatness and beauty, whatever awe they may strike into all other adorers are not defended from the bolder devotions of poetry. For such is the poet’s presumption that they have so long conversed with princes in effigy, till they have borrowed their ambition from the heroes they write and their confidence from the stage that represents them.

It is true, we live in an age so critical and so severe, that the Muse's melancholy groves grow everyday more desolate and even their softest airs to the late untenable ears sound harsh and unpleasant, poor poetry being so maliciously persecuted that nothing but the patronage of a great name can give it a pass to go peaceably and unmolested. And in these circumstances, self-preservation and security make our boldness a little more excusable.

The poorest ragged traveller that seeks a shelter in a storm, though under the battlements of an imperial palace, is not much to be blamed. This it is that makes poetry always come into the world under the umbrage of quality, whilst poets, like their blind original, never venture abroad without a guide. Nor can even the weakest brother of the Muses fail, when greatness and beauty are at once its powerful supporters. The Lady Henrietta's name will prove a charm against the sharpest critics. What malice dares strike where so much beauty shields? And indeed wit can hope for no success but when favoured by the fair, and it is by their influence alone, the poets, if ever, can be made immortal, who in return can but faintly pay their tribute to a power so favourable, since your Ladyship has a far greater title to be eternal in the records of fame, from the vast merits of your illustrious ancestors, than all the poetry since the world began can make you.

The famous earl of Cleveland and the no less famous lord Wentworth, both generals under our late sacred Majesty, are those never-to-be-forgotten heroes that, whilst the world shall have an ear and wonder a tongue, shall never want a name: worthies of that generous zeal and indefatigable allegiance, till they drained their estates so low that they fought even to the nakedness of a gladiator. Their loyalty and the service of their king being not only their study, but their religion, insomuch, that like him that resigns his share in the world for an interest in heaven, they were so little dejected even at ruin itself, when in a cause so glorious, that they bore the very poverty of philosophers with the pride of triumphers and the pleasure of martyrs. And to attain the highest character of perfection that humanity ever reached, with the bravery and courage of an Alexander, they had the peace and content of a Diogenes.

But their honourable losses your Ladyship’s kinder stars have amply repaid. And all those debts of Providence those loyal sufferers did not live long enough to receive, their arrears of glory are in your Ladyship’s completer happiness entailed on their posterity. The Lady Henrietta has a person and a mind so richly endowed and to these that prodigious mass of worldly blessings, as if Providence had studied to add new ornaments to her, whose birth, charms and virtues in themselves alone, rendered her a beauty inaccessible. So just it is, that such infinite perfections should be no little care of heaven, that are so great a part of it. But in the strange and prosperous recovery of your Ladyship’s exhausted patrimonies, the unexampled industry of the Lady Philadelphia, your Ladyship’s pious mother, to her immortal praise, will never be forgotten. When fate, by a too early stroke, had robbed her of her dear lord, she stepped into a seat so strangely demolished, beheld those ruins of an estate where the thunder of the war had made the desolation so low and the breaches so wide that the frightful prospect would have daunted a more than female spirit, where all hopes of re-building would appear an attempt altogether impossible. Yet that attempt the bolder Lady Philadelphia resolved and finished, stemmed all the adverse tides of fortune to gather up her family's shipwrecks and, with that incredible pains and no less wonderful success that she has rather created than repaired an estate, has miraculously heaped together an infinite treasure with no less toil than if she had laboured in the mine and dig the very oar that formed it. Never was a losing hand so ingeniously played, nor a last stake so artfully managed. Her happiness, her love and life were so lodged in her only hopes, her fair young darling Henrietta, that for her dear sake to advance her growing promising glory she acted with a zeal so vigorous as if she had taken a resolution even to outdo the pelican.

And as your Ladyship’s loyal ancestors, those two memorable English champions are that shining original that fame, when she paints anything that’s heroic, might for ever copy from. So, they are no less blessed in an heiress, whose majestic beauty to theirs and her own eternal monument, might sit for a Britannia. Your royal godfather might very frankly and largely promise wonders in the Lady Henrietta's name. For it was impossible there should be any common branch from a stock so perfectly illustrious. How then am I, beyond all measure, happy, thus gloriously protected? Methinks I look with scorn upon the censorious world and can defy my enemies with as great assurance as if I had the souls and swords of those prodigious heroes. And it is no small pride to me, when I consider I am the first of those many writers to come that have attained the glorious preferment of thus publicly writing myself,

Madam,

Your Ladyship’s most dutiful and most humbly devoted servant,

E. Settle.