ter, that I
tore his book for having abused my favourite hero. And now this saucy
Englishman has libelled us both. But I have a proposal to make to you
for the reparation of our honour. If you will join with me, we will turn
all these insolent scribblers out of Elysium, and throw them down
headlong to the bottom of Tartarus, in spite of Pluto and all his guards.

_Alexander_.--This is just such a scheme as that you formed at Bender, to
maintain yourself there, with the aid of three hundred Swedes, against
the whole force of the Ottoman Empire. And I must say that such follies
gave the English poet too much cause to call you a madman.

_Charles_.--If my heroism was madness, yours, I presume, was not wisdom.

_Alexander_.--There was a vast difference between your conduct and mine.
Let poets or declaimers say what they will, history shows that I was not
only the bravest soldier, but one of the ablest commanders the world has
ever seen. Whereas you, by imprudently leading your army into vast and
barren deserts at the approach of the winter, exposed it to perish in its
march for want of subsistence, lost your artillery, lost a great number
of your soldiers, and was forced to fight with the Muscovites under such
disadvantages as made it almost impossible for you to conquer.

_Charles_.--I will not dispute your superiority as a general. It is not
for me, a mere mortal, to contend with the son of Jupiter Ammon.

_Alexander_.--I suppose you think my pretending that Jupiter was my
father as much entitles me to the name of a madman as your extravagant
behaviour at Bender does you. But you are greatly mistaken. It was not
my vanity, but my policy, which set up that pretension. When I proposed
to undertake the conquest of Asia, it was necessary for me to appear to
the people something more than a man. They had been used to the idea of
demi-god heroes. I therefore claimed an equal descent with Osiris and
Sesostris, with Bacchus and Hercules, the former conquerors of the East.
The opinion of my divinity assisted my arms and subdued all nations
before me, from the Granicus to the Ganges. But though I called myself
the son of Jupiter, and kept up the veneration that name inspired, by a
courage which seemed more than human, and by the sublime magnanimity of
all my behaviour, I did not forget that I was the son of Philip. I used
the policy of my father and the wise lessons of Aristotle, whom he had
made my preceptor, in th