[20] “To begin with your character of Almanzor, which you avow to have taken from the Achilles in Homer; pray hear what Famianus Strada says of such talkers as Mr. Dryden:  Ridere soleo, cum video homines ab Homeri virtibus strenue declinates, si quid vero irrepsi vitii, id avide arripientes. But I might have spared this quotation, and you your avowing; for this character might as well have been borrowed from some of the stalls in Bedlam, or any of your own hair-brained cox-combs which you call heroes, and persons of honour.  I remember just such another fuming Achilles in Shakespeare, one ancient Pistol, whom he avows to be a man of so fiery a temper, and so impatient of an injury, even from Sir John Falstaff his captain, and a knight, that he not only disobeyed his commands about carrying a letter to Mrs. Page, but returned him an answer as full of contumely, and in as opprobrious terms, as he could imagine: 

  ’Let vultures gripe thy guts, for gourd and Fullam holds,
  And high and low beguiles the rich and poor. 
  Tester I’ll have in pouch, when thou shalt lack,
  Base Phrygian Turk,’ etc.

“Let’s see e’er an Abencerrago fly a higher pitch.  Take him at another turn, quarrelling with corporal Nym and old Zegri:  The difference arose about mine hostess Quickly (for I would not give a rush for a man unless he be particular in matters of this moment); they both aimed at her body, but Abencerrago Pistol defies his rival in these words: 

  ’Fetch from the powdering-tub of infamy
  That lazar-kite of Cressid’s kind,
  Doll Tearsheet, she by name, and her espouse: 
  I have, and I will hold,
  The quondam Quickly for the only she. 
  And pauca.’

There’s enough.  Does not quotation sound as well as I[20a]?

“But the four sons of Aminon, the three bold Beachams, the four London Prentices, Tamerlain, the Scythian Shepherd, Muleasses, Amurath, and Bajazet, or any raging Turk at the Red-bull and Fortune, might as well have been urged by you as a pattern of your Almanzor, as the Achilles in Homer; but then our laureate had not passed for so learned a man as he desires his unlearned admirers should esteem him.

“But I am strangely mistaken, if I have not seen this very Almanzor of your’s in some disguise about this town, and passing under another name.  Prithee tell me true, was not this huff-cap once the Indian Emperor, and, at another time, did not he call himself Maximme?  Was not Lyndaraxa once called Almeria, I mean under Montezuma the Indian Emperor?  I protest and vow they are either the same, or so alike, that I can’t for my heart distinguish one from the other.  You are, therefore, a strange unconscionable thief, that art not content to steal from others, but do’st rob thy poor wretched self too.”

[20a] [There is no I in the original where Clifford quotes: 

  [Greek:  Oinobares, kunos ommat echon kradiaen d elaphoio. 
  Daemoboros basileus.]