Page:Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems Volume I.pdf/13

 TO

WILLIAM HARLEY, ESQ.

SIR,

WHILE I ask your protection for these essays, I cannot deny having myself some esteem for them. Yet permit me to say, that did I not trust to your candour and sensibility, and hope they will plead for the errors your judgment must discover, I should never have availed myself of the liberty I have obtained -- that of dedicating these simple effusions to the greatest modern Master of that charming talent, in which I can never be more than a distant copyist.

I am, SIR,

Your most obedient

and obliged Servant,

CHARLOTTE SMITH.

VOL. I. b