To the illustrious and high-born princess, Elizabeth, duchess of Albemarle.

May it please your Grace,

This undressed play has been so little indebted to poet and painter, that it has wanted beauty to invite numbers and merit to secure friends. Yet with all its disadvantages, it has not mist of honours; when it has appeared, so often favoured by your Grace’s presence and sometimes by your commands; an encouragement so great, that your Grace little thinks what mischief you have brought upon yourself, by the persecution you are like to suffer from the addresses of so troublesome a favourite as poetry; yet such a favourite, whose arrogance you cannot blame. For, as it is said of poets, who are born, not made, it is so with their patrons. Your kindness is hereditary and you derive your friendship to the muses from your noble ancestry. The  name of Newcastle warrants my ambition. A person of that worth and gallantry, that he has been an Atlas to poetry; his bounty to it admits of no equal and his perfection in it, no superior. Nor has he only been the greatest protector of the muses, but their greatest subject too, witness those immortal trophies of allegiance, his late memorable services to an exile king and a declining crown; where his unbiased courage aimed at no other reward then the glory of his cause. And so, like Caesar, who after his conquests, wrote his own commentaries, the hand of a Newcastle acted, what the hand of a Newcastle only was worthy to write. Thus have his adorable qualities resembled the armed palace amongst the ancients; though in their infinite numbers of feigned deities, they to every attribute of a divinity, nay almost to every humane art appropriated a particular God, yet they united learning and arms. Thus has this illustrious hero charactered that divinity on Earth, which they but fancied in Heaven. But your Grace’s glory does not rest here. Your affinity is no less conspicuous, than your birth, being allied to another equal miracle of loyalty, an Albemarle, differing from the former only in time and fortune, that attended a setting and this ushered in a rising sun. Nor in this circle of honour does your Grace only share, but make a part. Your own virtues shine so worthy of the sphere they move in, that all your additional ornaments of fame and greatness, are not the gift, but the reward of providence. And on that score Mariamne throws herself at your feet. Your smiles have made her a captive and your virtues a Proselyte. But while so mean an offering as a play, begs your acceptance, the more worthless, in that the hasty representation of it did not give me time to put a finishing hand to it, the first copy of it being given me by a gentleman, to use and form as I pleased, I humbly implore, that, what the present wants may be supplied by the zeal and obedience of

Madam,

Your Grace’s most humble and most devoted servant,

Elkanah Settle.