most pious princess, our queen-dowager.  The French author of a novel, called “Don Sebastian,” has given that name to an African lady of his own invention, and makes her sister to Muley Mahomet; but I have wholly changed the accidents, and borrowed nothing but the supposition, that she was beloved by the king of Portugal.  Though, if I had taken the whole story, and wrought it up into a play, I might have done it exactly according to the practice of almost all the ancients, who were never accused of being plagiaries for building their tragedies on known fables.  Thus, Augustus Caesar wrote an “Ajax,” which was not the less his own, because Euripides had written a play before him on that subject.  Thus, of late years, Corneille writ an “OEdipus” after Sophocles; and I have designed one after him, which I wrote with Mr Lee; yet neither the French poet stole from the Greek, nor we from the Frenchman.  It is the contrivance, the new turn, and new characters, which alter the property, and make it ours.  The materia poetica is as common to all writers, as the materia medica to all physicians.  Thus, in our Chronicles, Daniel’s history is still his own, though Matthew Paris, Stow, and Hollingshed writ before him; otherwise we must have been content with their dull relations, if a better pen had not been allowed to come after them, and writ his own account after a new and better manner.

I must further declare freely, that I have not exactly kept to the three mechanic rules of unity.  I knew them, and had them in my eye, but followed them only at a distance; for the genius of the English cannot bear too regular a play:  we are given to variety, even to a debauchery of pleasure.  My scenes are therefore sometimes broken, because my underplot required them so to be, though the general scene remains,—­of the same castle; and I have taken the time of two days, because the variety of accidents, which are here represented, could not naturally be supposed to arrive in one:  but to gain a greater beauty, it is lawful for a poet to supersede a less.

I must likewise own, that I have somewhat deviated from the known history, in the death of Muley Moluch, who, by all relations, died of a fever in the battle, before his army had wholly won the field; but if I have allowed him another day of life, it was because I stood in need of so shining a character of brutality as I have given him; which is indeed the same with that of the present emperor Muley-Ishmael, as some of our English officers, who have been in his court, have credibly informed me.

I have been listening—­what objections had been made against the conduct of the play; but found them all so trivial, that if I should name them, a true critic would imagine that I played booty, and only raised up phantoms for myself to conquer.  Some are pleased to say—­the writing is dull; but, aetatem habet, de se loquatur. Others, that the double poison is unnatural:  let the