The feruent loue, and entire zeale and regarde, wherewith your L. euen in these tender and as yet vnripened yeares, seemeth to pursue the vertues and honourable worthinesse of the most renowned and famous, and the reuerend account, wherewith in your most secret imaginations you haue euer admired, & as it were emulated their highest progressions: hath mooued me in recordation thereof (and the rather to deliuer vnto your L. the verye true image and liuely counterfeit indeede, of vnblemished honour, adorned with all princely and most surpassing noblenes) to propose vnto your view, a paragon so peerlesse, and of so rare and excellent performaunce, as whereof no hystorie hath the semblable, no region the match, nor any worlde hereafter may eftsoones be supposed to produce the like. You shall not neede my L. to ransacke volumes, to search out the liues of the most honoured _Scipio_, amongst the Romanes, nor out of Greece to fetche _Themistocles_ or _Alcibiades_ from Lacedemon or Athens. Let _Haniball_ rest with his predecessors, who sometimes by vnbearded fortune did honor to mightie Carthage, and (before them all) Achilles and Hector, that made the fall of Troy so famous: And come wee into our owne Countrey, the land wherein our selues inhabite, the soyle to vs natiue, and of all others most deerest, and see you here my L. a Prince of so rare and incomparable worthinesse, as your selfe will confesse throughout all the course of his life, to haue beene of all others the moste happie and vertuous. _Edwarde_, my L. young _Edward_ (so helde in his fathers life) vnder whose raigne he died in Englande, surnamed for his noted excellencie, sometymes the _blacke Prince_. This is hee on whome Nature, Fortune and Vertue, to the intent to yeelde some apparaunt shewe of theyr woonderfull and mightie operations, had aboue all others so especially enriched with all kinde of wished and most exquisite perfections, as in that present season, in which the delicacie of his aspiring minde reste vnto himselfe the highest branch of honour from out her loftie seate of dignity, it was denied to any other whatsoeuer, to exceede? nay, but so much as to become partaker with so rare a patterne of the like fruites of vertue and neuer dying glory. And to the ende (in rehearsing some fewe of the many particularities of such sounde and vncorrupted maiestie) the radiant shining beames resiant in so high a personage, may with more facilitie the sooner bee discouered: wee will first beginne with his originall and foremost infancie, that by deducing from thence his complementes of princelie excellencie, euen in the verie mouth of his entombed graue, his bones may not bee reposed without an immortall recordation, and the fame of his vertue celebrated by an endlesse memorie. Needlesse were it my L. that I shoulde tell you of this statelie Prince, that hee were sonne and heire in succession, to the most mightie and most renowmed _Edward_