that Sebastian
should return to Portugal no more; but at the same time I had him at
my own disposal, whether to bestow him in Afric, or in any other
corner of the world, or to have closed the tragedy with his death; and
the last of these was certainly the most easy, but for the same reason
the least artful; because, as I have somewhere said, the poison and
the dagger are still at hand to butcher a hero, when a poet wants the
brains to save him. It being therefore only necessary, according to
the laws of the drama, that Sebastian should no more be seen upon the
throne, I leave it for the world to judge, whether or no I have
disposed of him according to art, or have bungled up the conclusion of
his adventure. In the drawing of his character, I forgot not piety,
which any one may observe to be one principal ingredient of it, even
so far as to be a habit in him; though I shew him once to be
transported from it by the violence of a sudden passion, to endeavour
a self-murder. This being presupposed, that he was religious, the
horror of his incest, though innocently committed, was the best reason
which the stage could give for hindering his return. It is true, I
have no right to blast his memory with such a crime; but declaring it
to be fiction, I desire my audience to think it no longer true, than
while they are seeing it represented; for that once ended, he may be a
saint, for aught I know, and we have reason to presume he is. On this
supposition, it was unreasonable to have killed him; for the learned
Mr Rymer has well observed, that in all punishments we are to regulate
ourselves by poetical justice; and according to those measures, an
involuntary sin deserves not death; from whence it follows, that to
divorce himself from the beloved object, to retire into a desert, and
deprive himself of a throne, was the utmost punishment which a poet
could inflict, as it was also the utmost reparation which Sebastian
could make. For what relates to Almeyda, her part is wholly
fictitious. I know it is the surname of a noble family in Portugal,
which was very instrumental in the restoration of Don John de
Braganza, father to the most illustrious and 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 belo