THE RIGHT HONOURABLE ROGER, EARL OF ORRERY[1].

[Footnote 1:  This distinguished person was fifth son of Richard Boyle, known by the title of the great Earl of Cork.  His first title was Lord Broghill, under which he distinguished himself in Ireland.  Cromwell, although his lordship was a noted royalist, and in actual correspondence with the exiled monarch, had so much confidence in his honour and talents, that he almost compelled him to act as lord lieutenant of that kingdom, under the stipulation that he was to come under no oaths, and only to act against the rebel Irish, then the common enemy.  He was instrumental in the restoration, and created earl of Orrery by Charles II, in 1660, He deserved Dryden’s panegyric in every respect, except as a poet—­the very character, however, in which he is most complimented, and perhaps was best pleased to be so.  He wrote, 1st, The Art of War—­2d, Parthenissa, a romance—­3d, Some Poems—­4th; Eight Plays—­5th, State Tracts.]

My Lord,

This worthless present was designed you long before it was a play; when it was only a confused mass of thoughts, tumbling over one another in the dark; when the fancy was yet in its first work, moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be distinguished, and then either chosen or rejected by the judgment; it was yours, my lord, before I could call it mine.  And, I confess, in that first tumult of my thoughts, there appeared a disorderly kind of beauty in some of them, which gave me hope, something, worthy my lord of Orrery, might be drawn from them:  But I was then in that eagerness of imagination, which, by overpleasing fanciful men, flatters them into the danger of writing; so that, when I had moulded it into that shape it now bears, I looked with such disgust upon it, that the censures of our severest critics are charitable to what I thought (and still think) of it myself:  It is so far from me to believe this perfect, that I am apt to conclude our best plays are scarcely so; for the stage being the representation of the world, and the actions in it, how can it be imagined, that the picture of human life can be more exact than life itself is?  He may be allowed sometimes to err, who undertakes to move so many characters and humours, as are requisite in a play, in those narrow channels which are proper to each of them; to conduct his imaginary persons through so many various intrigues and chances, as the labouring audience shall think them lost under every billow; and then, at length, to work them so naturally out of their distresses, that, when the whole plot is laid open, the spectators may rest satisfied, that every cause was powerful enough to produce the effect it had; and that the whole chain of them was with such due order linked together, that the first accident would naturally beget the second, till they all rendered the conclusion necessary.