A very nice, dapper, and respectful little preface, the time and place of writing which is solemnly recorded at the end-Hope _Place, 1st Sept._ 1803.
But how much fuller my satisfaction, as I fondly linger over this circumstantial paragraph, if the writer had recorded the precise hour of the day, and by what timepiece; and if he had but mentioned his age, occupation, and name.
But all is now lost; I know not who he was; and this estimable author must needs share the oblivious fate of all literary incognitos.
He must have possessed the grandest and most elevated ideas of true fame, since he scorned to be perpetuated by a solitary initial. Could I find him out now, sleeping neglected in some churchyard, I would buy him a headstone, and record upon it naught but his title-page, deeming that his noblest epitaph.
After the preface, the book opens with an extract from a prologue written by the excellent Dr. Aiken, the brother of Mrs. Barbauld, upon the opening of the Theater Royal, Liverpool, in 1772:—
_“Where Mersey’s stream, long winding o’er the plain, Pours his full tribute to the circling main, A band of fishers chose their humble seat; Contented labor blessed the fair retreat, Inured to hardship, patient, bold, and rude, They braved the billows for precarious food: Their straggling huts were ranged along the shore, Their nets and little boats their only store.”_
Indeed, throughout, the work abounds with quaint poetical quotations, and old-fashioned classical allusions to the Aeneid and Falconer’s Shipwreck.
And the anonymous author must have been not only a scholar and a gentleman, but a man of gentle disinterestedness, combined with true city patriotism; for in his _“Survey of__ the Town”_ are nine thickly printed pages of a neglected poem by a neglected Liverpool poet.
By way of apologizing for what might seem an obtrusion upon the public of so long an episode, he courteously and feelingly introduces it by saying, that _“the poem has now for several years been scarce, and is at present but little known; and hence a very small portion of it will no doubt be highly acceptable to the cultivated reader; especially as this noble epic is written with great felicity of expression and the sweetest delicacy of feeling.”_