Note 15 — LOVE ELEGIES AND EPISTLES. [15]

These little poems were written in the early youth of the author. They describe an attachment between a lady of birth, rank, beauty, and talents, the daughter of wealthy parents, and a gentleman, much her inferior in family and station, without fortune, and her equal only in intellect, merit, and affection. Nor is the situation entirely imaginary; the author was entrusted with the perusal of a prose correspondence between that unhappy pair, which bore the same sort of relation to the ensuing poems, as the real letters between Abelard and Eloisa bear to Pope’s Love-Epistle, “Eloisa to Abelard.”