In all its incidents and motives the story is eternally true. The
fateful beauty, playing now the part of Potiphar's wife, and now the yet
commoner role of an enchantress whose charms drive men to madness and
crime, men who adore her even from their prison cell and are glad to go
to a shameful death for her sake, appears in all history, in all
literature, nay, in the very newspaper scandals and police courts of
to-day. As a picture of untrammelled passion, culpable and corrupt, but
yet terribly fascinating in her very recklessness and abandon, Miranda
is indeed a powerful study. Always guilty, she is always excused, or if
punished but sparingly and little, whilst the friar languishes in a foul
dungeon, the page-boy is hanged, her husband stands upon the public
scaffold. And then in the end, 'very penitent for her life past', she is
received with open arms by Tarquin's old father, who looks upon her as a
very angel, and retiring to the tranquility of a country-house she
passes her days in 'as perfect a state of happiness as this troublesome
world can afford'.

To
HENRY PAIN, ESQ;

Sir,

Dedications are like Love, and no Man of Wit or Eminence escapes them;
early or late, the Affliction of the Poet's Complement falls upon him;
and Men are oblig'd to receive 'em as they do their Wives; _For better,
for worse_; at lest with a feign'd Civility.

It was not Want of Respect, but Fear, that has hitherto made us keep
clear of your Judgment, too piercing to be favourable to what is not
nicely valuable. We durst not awaken your Criticism; and by begging your
Protection in the Front of a Book, give you an Occasion to find nothing
to deserve it. Nor can this little History lay a better Claim to that
Honour, than those that have not pretended to it; which has but this
Merit to recommend it, That it is Truth: Truth, which you so much
admire. But 'tis a Truth that entertains you with so many Accidents
diverting and moving, that they will need both a Patron, and an Assertor
in this incredulous World. For however it may be imagin'd that Poetry
(my Talent) has so greatly the Ascendant over me, that all I write must
pass for Fiction, I now desire to have it understood that this is
Reality, and Matter of Fact, and acted in this our latter Age: And that
in the person of _Tarquin_, I bring a Prince to kiss your Hands, who
own'd himself, and was receiv'd, as the last of the Race of the _Roman_
Kings; whom I have often seen, an