You will pardon the liberty I take in desiring your acceptance of the accompanying volume, when I tell you that your /own/ remarks, in the too short conversation I had with you when you favoured me with your last kind visit, is the cause of my sending it. This book was the first I ever attempted of the same nature. I think it was written near 40 years ago: I published both /Essays/ anonymously, thinking they were too bold to be forgiven. The French Revolution was then deluging our country with an overflowing /excess/ of infidelity and profligacy, which affected the general character of the higher Classes. Your opinion so exactly corresponded with my own on this Subject, of the great improvement of religion and morals among persons of rank and fashion in the present period, as to suggest to me the idea of the trouble I now impose /upon you/

The Tracts &c at the end were for the lower class. The two first Articles in the Volume are all that you need take the trouble to read, if you should ever find a few idle moments, which I fear never can be, except in your Carriage, where I am told you are frequently seen reading.

I never shall forget the amusement it was to me, (for I was then living in the company of the great and the gay) to be continually asked “Have you seen the Manners of the Great”? “Who could have written it?” I looking all the time so innocent and so ignorant. /The/ Titles, not the Merit of these two little /works/ gave an astonishing rapidity to Sale.

I am confirmed in the opinion we both expressed on the subject in question by M^r. Wilberforce now frequently saying to me “when you and I were first acquainted forty years since, where we then knew one religious person of fashion, we now know twenty.” I have just been looking in his (M^r. Wilberforce’s) admirable work called “a Practical view of the Religion of persons in the higher circles,” written more than 30 years ago, in which he there severely censures their habits /of/ which he now speaks as so much improved.

I fear when you look at my book, you will be apt to say to it as Milton said of Eve,
“Of outward form elaborate,
“Of inward less exact.”