o divest them quite
of human passions and frailties: they content themselves to shew you,
what men of great spirits would certainly do when they were provoked,
not what they were obliged to do by the strict rules of moral virtue.
For my own part, I declare myself for Homer and Tasso, and am more in
love with Achilles and Rinaldo, than with Cyrus and Oroondates. I
shall never subject my characters to the French standard, where love
and honour are to be weighed by drams and scruples: Yet, where I have
designed the patterns of exact virtues, such as in this play are the
parts of Almahide, of Ozmyn, and Benzayda, I may safely challenge the
best of theirs.

But Almanzor is taxed with changing sides: and what tie has he on him
to the contrary? He is not born their subject whom he serves, and he
is injured by them to a very high degree. He threatens them, and
speaks insolently of sovereign power; but so do Achilles and Rinaldo,
who were subjects and soldiers to Agamemnon and Godfrey of Bulloigne.
He talks extravagantly in his passion; but, if I would take the pains
to quote an hundred passages of Ben Jonson's Cethegus, I could easily
shew you, that the rhodomontades of Almanzor are neither so irrational
as his, nor so impossible to be put in execution; for Cethegus
threatens to destroy nature, and to raise a new one out of it; to kill
all the senate for his part of the action; to look Cato dead; and a
thousand other things as extravagant he says, but performs not one
action in the play.

But none of the former calumnies will stick; and, therefore, it is at
last charged upon me, that Almanzor does all things; or if you will
have an absurd accusation, in their nonsense who make it, that he
performs impossibilities: they say, that being a stranger, he appeases
two fighting factions, when the authority of their lawful sovereign
could not. This is indeed the most improbable of all his actions, but
it is far from being impossible. Their king had made himself
contemptible to his people, as the history of Granada tells us; and
Almanzor, though a stranger, yet was already known to them by his
gallantry in the Juego de torros, his engagement on the weaker side,
and more especially by the character of his person and brave actions,
given by Abdalla just before; and, after all, the greatness of the
enterprise consisted only in the daring, for he had the king's guards
to second him: But we have read both of Caesar, and many other
general