ABSTRACT
A Preface to this Work, might well have been spared; yet complying with Custom, I shall only tell you, if what has been acceptable to the greatest part of Europe, and still continues its admirable Beauty and Lustre, deck’d in the rich Ornaments of an elegant Stile and sweetness of Language, coming very near to that of the Original, can yet be so successful as to please an Age pretending to be more refined than those of the former, I cannot but suppose I may without any scruple of those doubts and fears (that cause some Works of this nature to come abroad with a kind of a trembling, at the uncertain expectation of the Censure that will pass upon them in the various opinions of the World as to their Merit or Disesteem) present you with the Fam’d History of Cassandra, faithfully rendred into English, from the most correct Copy, that ever yet appear’d in the refined French; the Author of which (for the admirable Characters he has given of Vertue in its sublimest notions, as also an unshaken Fidelity and Constancy in what is or ought to be term’d the Essentials of Love, attended with unblemished Honour in its superlative degree, concentered in illustrious persons of either Sex) has already engrossed to himself a Reputation and Esteem, fixed so high on the Pyramid of deserved Fame, that Prejudice is unable to reach it, and even the eyes of Envy grow weak and dazl’d in her fruitlesly raising them, to tarnish what shines so far above her Sphere.
