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BL Add. MS 28266, ff. 86–87 (copy); published in 1809 as accompanying the Farmer’s Boy MS, pp. xxii–xxiv
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editors wish to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
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A total stranger, very low, and very obscure, ventures to address you. In my sedentary employment as a journeyman shoemaker, I have amused and exercised my mind, I hope innocently: in putting the little events of my boyage into metre, intending it as a present to an aged mother now living on the spot; to whom the Church, the Mad Girl, the Farm-house, and all the local circumstances of the piece are intimately known.
Before I send it away, something perswades me that I might possibly find some person capable, and possessing condescension enough to satisfy me in a desire I feel of knowing whether the little piece, particularly Autumn, and Winter, contains any thing like poetical merit. — that is to say, to what excellence in others it makes the nearest approaches. I am fully sensible, from my situation in the world, from the nature of this application, and from the Better employment of your time, Sir, that silent neglect is what I have most reason to look for. But in that case I am determined to rely on your justice so far as to let the copy be return’d to me when I call for it, which I mean to do this day fortnight. When, if I should find a word of opinion inserted in the blank leaves, my end would be answerd, and it shall allways be held in grateful remembrance by one who, with the strictest truth, and with all possible deference and expect, subscribes, Sir,