confess, are not altogether so musical as the French; and yet they have been pleased already with THE TEMPEST, and some pieces that followed, which were neither much better written, nor so well composed as this. If it finds encouragement, I dare promise myself to mend my hand, by making a more pleasing fable; in the mean time, every loyal Englishman cannot but be satisfied with the moral of this, which so plainly represents the double restoration of his sacred Majesty.*

POSTSCRIPT.

This Preface being wholly written before the death of my late royal master, (quem semper acerbum, semper honoratum, sie Dii voluistis, habebo,) I have now lately reviewed it, as supposing I should find many notions in it that would require correction on cooler thoughts. After four months lying by me, I looked on it as no longer mine, because I had wholly forgotten it; but I confess with some satisfaction, and perhaps a little vanity, that I found myself entertained by it; my own judgment was new to me, and pleased me when I looked on it as another man's. I see no opinion that I would retract or alter, unless it be, that

*The discomfiture of Shaftesbury and his adherents in 1682, our author considered as a second restoration of his royal master.

possibly the Italians went not so far as Spain for the invention of their operas. They might have it in their own country; and that by gathering up the shipwrecks of the Athenian and Roman theatres, which we know were adorned with scenes, musick, dances, and machines,-especially the Grecian. But of this the learned Monsieur Vossius, who has made our nation his second country, is the best, and perhaps the only judge now living. As for the opera itself, it was all composed, and was just ready to have been performed, when he in honour of whom it was principally made, was taken from us.

He had been pleased twice or thrice to command that it should be practised before him, especially the first and third acts of it; and publickly declared more than once, that the composition and choruses were more just, and more beautiful, than any he had heard in England. How nice an ear he had in musick is sufficiently known; his praise, therefore, has established the reputation of it above censure, and made it in a manner sacred; it is therefore humbly and religiously dedicated to his memory.

It might reasonably have been expected, that his death must have changed the whole fabrick of the opera, or at least a great part of it; but the design of it originally was so happy, that it needed no alteration, properly so called; for the addition of twenty or thirty lines in the apotheosis of

Albion, has made it entirely of a piece. This was the only way which could have been invented to save it from a botched ending, and it fell luckily into my imagination; as if there were a kind of fatality even in the most trivial things concerning the succession: a change was made, and not for the worse, without the least confusion or disturbance; and those very causes which seemed to threaten us with troubles, conspired to produce our lasting happiness.

DEDICATION

OF

DON SEBASTIAN,

KING OF PORTUGAL.'

TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

PHILIP, EARL OF LEICESTER, &c. *

FAR be it from me, my most noble Lord, to

think that any thing which my meanness can produce, should be worthy to be offered to your patronage, or that aught which I can say of you

This tragedy, which was acted by the King's Servants at the Theatre Royal, with great applause, (as Langbaine, who wrote soon afterwards, tells us he had heard,) was first printed in 1690. Between 1682 and this period, our author had discontinued writing for the stage.

"DON SEBASTIAN (says Dr. Johnson, contrasting, it should seem, this play with ALL FOR LOVE,) is commonly esteemed either the first or second of Dryden's dramatick performances. It is too long to be all acted, and has many characters and many incidents; and though it is not without sallies of frantick dignity, and more noise than meaning, yet as it makes approaches to the possibilities of real life, and has some sentiments which leave a strong impression, it continued long to attract attention. Amidst