ABSTRACT
Prefaces to Books, like Prologues to Plays, will seldom be found to invite Readers, and still less often to convey importance. Excuses for mean performances add only the baseness of submission to poverty of sentiment, and take from insipidity the praise of being inoffensive. We do not, however, by this little address mean to deprecate public Criticism, or solicit regard; why we wrote the verses may be easily explain’d; we wrote them to divert ourselves, and to say kind things of each other; we collected them that our reciprocal expressions of kindness might not be lost, and we printed them because we had no reason to be ashamed of our mutual partiality. Portrait Painting, though unadorn’d by allegorical allusions, and unsupported by recollections of events or places, will be esteem’d for ever as one of the most durable methods to keep tenderness alive, and preserve Friendship from decay: nor do I observe that the room here where Artists of many Ages have contributed their own likenesses to the royal Gallery is less frequented than that which contains the statue of a slave and the picture of a Sybil. Our little Book can scarcely be less important to Readers of a different Age or nation than we ourselves are ready to acknowledge it; the waters of a mineral spring which sparkle in the glass, and exhilarate the spirits of those who drink them on the spot, grow vapid and tasteless by carriage and keeping; until we could find something important and instructive to say, we shall at least be allow’d to have glisten’d innocently in Italian Sunshine; and to have imbibed from its rays the warmth of mutual Benevolence, though we may have miss’d the hardness and polish that some coarser Metal might have obtain’d by heat of equal force. I will not however lengthen out my Preface; if the Book is but a feather, tying a stone to it can be no good policy, though it were a precious one; the lighter body would not make the heavy one swim, but the heavy body would inevitably make the light one sink.
