In what else concerns the play, I shall be brief: For the faults of the writing and contrivance, I leave them to the mercy of the reader. For I am as little apt to defend my own errors, as to find those of other poets. Only, I observe, that the great censors of wit and poetry, either produce nothing of their own, or what is more ridiculous than any thing they reprehend. Much of ill nature, and a very little judgment, go far in finding the mistakes of writers.
I pretend not that any thing of mine can be correct: This poem, especially, which was contrived, and written in seven weeks, though afterwards hindered by many accidents from a speedy representation, which would have been its just excuse.
Yet the scenes are every where unbroken, and the unities of place and time more exactly kept, than perhaps is requisite in a tragedy; or, at least, than I have since preserved them in the "Conquest of Granada."
I have not everywhere observed the equality of numbers, in my verse; partly by reason of my haste; but more especially, because I would not have my sense a slave to syllables.
It is easy to discover, that I have been very bold in my alteration of the story, which of itself was too barren for a play; and that I have taken from the church two martyrs, in the persons of Porphyrius, and the empress, who suffered for the Christian faith, under the tyranny of Maximin.
I have seen a French play, called the "Martyrdom of St Catharine:" But those, who have read it, will soon clear me from stealing out of so dull an author. I have only borrowed a mistake from him, of one Maximin for another; for finding him in the French poet, called the son of a Thracian herdsman, and an Alane woman, I too easily believed him to have been the same Maximin mentioned in Herodian. Till afterwards, consulting Eusebius and Metaphrastes, I found the Frenchman had betrayed me into an error, when it was too late to alter it, by mistaking that first Maximin for a second, the contemporary of Constantine the Great, and one of the usurpers of the eastern empire.
But neither was the other name of my play more fortunate; for, as some, who had heard of a tragedy of St Catharine, imagined I had taken my plot from thence; so others, who had heard of another play, called "L'Amour Tyrannique," with the same ignorance, accused me to have borrowed my design from it, because I have accidentally given my play the same title; not having to this day seen it, and knowing only by report that such a comedy is extant in French, under the name of "Monsieur Scudery."