your own glory. You are still meditating on new labours for yourself,
and new triumphs for the nation; and when our former enemies again
provoke us, you will again solicit fate to provide you another navy to
overcome, and another admiral to be slain. You will then lead forth a
nation eager to revenge their past injuries; and, like the Romans,
inexorable to peace, till they have fully vanquished. Let our enemies
make their boast of a surprise,[5] as the Samnities did of a
successful stratagem; but the _Furcæ Caudinæ_ will never be forgiven
till they are revenged. I have always observed in your royal highness
an extreme concernment for the honour of your country; it is a passion
common to you with a brother, the most excellent of kings; and in your
two persons are eminent the characters which Homer has given us of
heroick virtue; the commanding part in Agamemnon, and the executive in
Achilles. And I doubt not from both your actions, but to have abundant
matter to fill the annals of a glorious reign, and to perform the part
of a just historian to my royal master, without intermixing with it
any thing of the poet.

In the mean time, while your royal highness is preparing fresh
employments for our pens, I have been examining my own forces, and
making trial of myself, how I shall be able to transmit you to
posterity. I have formed a hero, I confess, not absolutely perfect,
but of an excessive and over-boiling courage; but Homer and Tasso are
my precedents. Both the Greek and the Italian poet had well
considered, that a tame hero, who never transgresses the bounds of
moral virtue, would shine but dimly in an epic poem; the strictness of
those rules might well give precepts to the reader, but would
administer little of occasion to the writer. But a character of an
eccentrick virtue is the more exact image of human life, because he is
not wholly exempted from its frailties; such a person is Almanzor,