our enemies make their boast of a surprise,[5] as the Samnities did of a successful stratagem; but the Furcae Caudinae will never be forgiven till they are revenged.  I have always observed in your royal highness an extreme concernment for the honour of your country; it is a passion common to you with a brother, the most excellent of kings; and in your two persons are eminent the characters which Homer has given us of heroick virtue; the commanding part in Agamemnon, and the executive in Achilles.  And I doubt not from both your actions, but to have abundant matter to fill the annals of a glorious reign, and to perform the part of a just historian to my royal master, without intermixing with it any thing of the poet.

In the mean time, while your royal highness is preparing fresh employments for our pens, I have been examining my own forces, and making trial of myself, how I shall be able to transmit you to posterity.  I have formed a hero, I confess, not absolutely perfect, but of an excessive and over-boiling courage; but Homer and Tasso are my precedents.  Both the Greek and the Italian poet had well considered, that a tame hero, who never transgresses the bounds of moral virtue, would shine but dimly in an epic poem; the strictness of those rules might well give precepts to the reader, but would administer little of occasion to the writer.  But a character of an eccentrick virtue is the more exact image of human life, because he is not wholly exempted from its frailties; such a person is Almanzor, whom I present, with all humility, to the patronage of your royal highness.  I designed in him a roughness of character, impatient of injuries, and a confidence of himself, almost approaching to an arrogance.  But these errors are incident only to great spirits; they are moles and dimples, which hinder not a face from being beautiful, though that beauty be not regular; they are of the number of those amiable imperfections which we see in mistresses, and which we pass over without a strict examination, when they are accompanied with greater graces.  And such in Almanzor are a frank and noble openness of nature, an easiness to forgive his conquered enemies, and to protect them in distress; and, above all, an inviolable faith in his affection.

This, sir, I have briefly shadowed to your royal highness, that you may not be ashamed of that hero, whose protection you undertake.  Neither would I dedicate him to so illustrious a name, if I were conscious to myself that he did or said any thing which was wholly unworthy of it.  However, since it is not just that your royal highness should defend or own what possibly may be my error, I bring before you this accused Almanzor in the nature of a suspected criminal.  By the suffrage of the most and best he already is acquitted; and by the sentence of some, condemned.  But as I have no reason to stand to the award of my enemies, so neither dare I trust the partiality of my friends:  I make my last appeal to your royal highness, as to