To THE Right Hon. 

 CHARLES, EARL OF HARDWICKE, 



etc. etc. etc. 



My Lord, — It is customary in a Dedication to use the language 

 of fulsome adulation, even in cases where the writer and the 

 person addressed affect an equal abhon*ence of it. Adopting 

 a more simple, straightforward course, and one more worthy 

 of my name, for few foxes have run more straight, I will 

 candidly inform yom' Lordship that the love I bear you is 

 much the same as that borne to myself by the most venerable 

 hen now cackling in your farmyard, whose half-fledged brood 

 I have often thinned. But, my Lord, although I openly 

 acknowledge my aversion to the imfeathered biped species to 

 which you belong, yet the kinds and degrees of hatred are 

 various as the characters of those towards whom we entertain 

 it ; and while some, affecting to treat my persecuted race as 

 noxious vermin, destroy us by day and by night with snare, 

 trap, gim, and every other engine which their ingenuity can 

 devise, we have always found in your Lordship a fair and open 

 enemy, and one who disdained to have recourse to the cowardly 



