Poems on Several Occasions (Mallet, 1762)

Your Grace has given leave, that these few Poems should appear in the world under the patronage of your Name. But this leave would have been refused, I know, had you expected to find your own praises, however just, in any part of the present address. I do not say it, my Lord, in the stile of compliment. Genuine modesty, the companion and the grace of true merit, may be surely dis​tinguished from the affectation of it: as surely as the native glowing of a fine complexion from that artificial coloring, which is used, in vain, to supply what Nature had denied, or has resumed.

Yet, permit me just to hint, my Lord, while I restrain my pen from all enlargement, that if the fairest public character must be raised upon private virtue, as surely it must, your Grace has laid already the securest foundation of the former, in the latter. The eyes of mankind are therefore turned upon you: and, from what you are known to have done, in one way, they reasonably look for whatever can be expected from a great and good man, in the other.

The Author of these lighter amusements hopes soon to present your Grace ​with something more solid, more deserving your attention, in the life of the first Duke of Marlborough.

You will then see, that superior talents for war have been, tho they rarely are, accompanied with equal abilities for negotiation and that the same extensive capacity, which could guide all the tumultuous scenes of the camp, knew how to direct, with equal skill, the calmer but more perplexing operations of the cabinet.

In the mean while; that you may live to adorn the celebrated and difficult title you wear; that you may be, like him, the defender of your country in days of public danger; and in times of peace, what is perhaps less frequently ​found, the friend and patron of those useful and ornamental arts, by which human nature is exalted and human society rendered more happy: This, my Lord, is respectfully the wish of