with each other, with common sense and ordinary probability, extorted
also by torments of the mind or body, or both, Captain Gabriel
Towerson, and nine other English merchants of consideration, were
executed; and, to add insult to atrocity, the bloody cloth, on which
Towerson kneeled at his death, was put down to the account of the
English Company. The reader may find the whole history in the second
volume of Purchas's "Pilgrim." The news of this horrible massacre
reached King James, while he was negociating with the Dutch concerning
the assistance which they then implored against the Spaniards; and the
affairs of his son-in-law, the Elector Palatine, appeared to render an
union with Holland so peremptorily necessary, that the massacre of
Amboyna was allowed to remain unrevenged.

But the Dutch war, which was declared in 1672, the object of which
seems to have been the annihilation of the United Provinces as an
independent state, a century sooner than Providence had decreed that
calamitous event, met with great opposition in England, and every
engine was put to work to satisfy the people of the truth of the Lord
Chancellor Shaftesbury's averment, that the "States of Holland were
England's eternal enemies, both by interest and inclination." Dryden,
with the avowed intention of exasperating the nation against the
Dutch, assumed from choice, or by command, the unpromising subject of
the Amboyna massacre as the foundation of the following play.
Exclusive of the horrible nature of the subject, the colours are laid
on too thick to produce the desired effect. The monstrous caricatures,
which are exhibited as just paintings of the Dutch character,
unrelieved even by the grandeur of wickedness, and degraded into
actual brutality, must have produced disgust, instead of an animated
hatred and detestation. For the horrible spectacle of tortures and
mangled limbs exhibited on the stage, the author might plead the