his brothers, because I have landed him on a hospitable shore.  Under your patronage Montezuma hopes he is more safe than in his native Indies; and therefore comes to throw himself at your grace’s feet, paying that homage to your beauty, which he refused to the violence of his conquerors.  He begs only, that when he shall relate his sufferings, you will consider him as an Indian Prince, and not expect any other eloquence from his simplicity, than what his griefs have furnished him withal.  His story is, perhaps, the greatest which was ever represented in a poem of this nature; the action of it including the discovery and conquest of a new world.  In it I have neither wholly followed the truth of the history, nor altogether left it; but have taken all the liberty of a poet, to add, alter, or diminish, as I thought might best conduce to the beautifying of my work:  it being not the business of a poet to represent historical truth, but probability.  But I am not to make the justification of this poem, which I wholly leave to your grace’s mercy.  It is an irregular piece, if compared with many of Corneille’s, and, if I may make a judgment of it, written with more flame than art; in which it represents the mind and intentions of the author, who is with much more zeal and integrity, than design and artifice,

MADAM,
Your Grace’s most obedient,
And most obliged servant,
JOHN DRYDEN,
October 12. 1667.

Betwixt 1664, when our author assisted Sir Robert Howard in composing the preceding play, and the printing of the Indian Emperor in 1668, some disagreement had arisen betwixt them.  Sir Robert appears to have given the first provocation, by prefixing to his tragedy of the Duke of Lerma, or Great Favourite, in 1668, some remarks, which drew down the following severe retort.  It is therefore necessary to mention the contents of the offensive preface.

Sir Robert Howard begins, as one taking leave of the drama and dramatic authors, “his too long acquaintances;” and unwilling again to venture “into the civil wars of Censure,

Ubi—­Nullos habitura triumphos.”

He states his unwilling interference to be owing to the “unnecessary understanding” of some, who endeavoured to apply as strict rules to poetry as mathematics, which rendered it incumbent on him to justify his having written some scenes of his tragedy in blank verse.  In the next paragraph, Dryden is expressly pointed out as the author of the Essay on Dramatic Poetry; and is ridiculed for attempting to prove, not that rhyme is more natural in a dialogue on the stage supposed to be spoken extempore, but grander and more expressive.  In like manner, Sir Robert unfortunately banters our author for drawing from Seneca an instance of a lofty mode of expressing so ordinary a thing as shutting a door[A], instead of giving an example to the same effect in English.

[Footnote A: 

Reserate clusos regii postes laris.