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G. WOODFALL, PRINTER, ANGEL COURT, SKINNER STREET, LONDON.

TO

DAVID GARDINER, Esq.

CORNET IN SIR JOHN COPE'S REGIMENT OF DRAGOONS.

DEAR SIR,

WHILE my heart is following you, with a truly paternal solicitude, through all the dangers of military life, in which you are thus early engaged, anxious for your safety amidst the instruments of death, and the far more dangerous allurements of vice; I feel a peculiar pleasure in being able at length, though after such long delays, to put into your hands the Memoirs with which I now present you. They contain many particulars, which would have

been worthy of your attentive notice, had they related to a person of the most distant nation or age: but they will, I doubt not, command your peculiar regard, as they are sacred to the memory of that excellent man from whom you had the honour to derive your birth, and by whose generous and affectionate care you have been laid under all the obligations which the best of fathers could confer on a most beloved son.

Here, Sir, you see a gentleman, who with all the advantages of a liberal and religious education, added to every natural accomplishment that could render him most agreeable, entered, before he had attained the stature of man, on those arduous and generous services to which you are devoted, and behaved in

them with them with a gallantry and courage which will always give a splendor to his name among the British soldiery, and render him an example to all officers of his rank. But, alas! amidst all the intrepidity of the martial hero, you see him vanquished by the blandishments of pleasure, and in chase of it plunging himself into follies and vices, for which no want of education or genius could have been a sufficient excuse. You behold him urging the ignoble and fatal pursuit, unmoved by the terrors which death was continually darting around him, and the most signal deliverances by which Providence again and again rescued him from those terrors; till at length he was reclaimed by an ever-memorable interposition of divine grace. Then you have the pleasure of seeing

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