of the commercial prosperity of Great Britain. We have here no Arcadia, in which to place shepherds with their pipes; for the country is to be looked upon as completely a manufacturing, and not as a pastoral. Descriptive poetry may, in some measure, be considered an account of the sensations of the writer, produced by a view of the country; and it is necessary to pass by many objects, least a sameness should pervade the whole: it would have been easy to have introduced a description of many more seats, had not this been thought a sufficient reason for declining to do so.
It has been so common to make trifling apologies for things of this kind, that it has become almost a custom; but it appears so unmanly to deprecate criticism by the acknowledgment of trivial errors, that if the writer were asked, what lead him to write, and more what lead him to print, he would answer, that he did the one for his amusement, and the other because he saw no impropriety in it.
N. B. When this poem was in the press, the writer received the unfortunate and afflicting intelligence of the death of the intelligent and amiable gentleman to whom he had dedicated.
