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CLIFTON GROVE.

VOL. II.

This, and the following Poems, are reprinted from the little

volume which Henry published in 1803.

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PREFACE.

THE following attempts in Verse, are laid before the Public with extreme diffidence. The Author is very conscious that the juvenile efforts of a youth, who has not received the polish of Academical discipline, and who has been but sparingly blessed with opportunities for the prosecution of scholastic pursuits, must necessarily be defective in the accuracy and finished elegance, which mark the works of the man who has passed his life in the retirement of his study, furnishing his mind with images, and at the same time attaining the power of disposing those images to the best advantage.

The unpremeditated effusions of a Boy, from his thirteenth year, employed, not in the acquisition of literary information, but in the more active business of life, must not be expected to exhibit any considerable portion of the correctness of a Virgil, or the vigorous compression of a Horace. Men are not, I believe, frequently known to bestow much labour on their amusements; and these Poems were, most of them, written merely to beguile a leisure hour, or to fill up the languid intervals of studies of a severer nature.

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