the latter. I am far from fuppofing, that Homer, Hefiod, and the other antient poets and mythologifts, had any fettled defign to pervert and confuse the records of antiquity; but it is certain they have effected it; and, for my part, I must confefs I should have honoured and loved Homer more had he written a true hiftory of his own times in humble profe, than thofe noble poems that have so justly collected the praise of all ages; for though I read these with more admiration and aftonifhment, I still read Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, with more amufement and more fatisfaction.

THE original poets were not, however, without excufe. They found the limits of nature too ftrait for the immenfity of their genius, which they had not room to exert, without extending fact by fiction; and that especially at a time when the manners of men were too fimple to afford that variety, which they have fince offered in vain to the choice of the meaneft writers.

In doing this, they are again excufable for the manner in which they have done it,

Ut fpeciofa dehinc miracula promant.

They are not indeed fo properly faid to turn reality into fiction, as fiction into reality. Their paintings are fo bold, their colours fo ftrong, that every thing they touch feems to exist in the very manner they reprefent it: their portraits are fo juft, and their landscapes fo beau-. tiful, that we acknowledge the ftrokes of nature in both, without enquiring whether nature herself, or her journeyman the poet, formed the first pattern of the piece.

BUT other writers (I will put Pliny at their head) have no fuch pretenfions. to indulgence: they lye for lying fake, or in order infolently to impose the most monftrous improbabilities and abfurdities upon their readers on their own authority; treating them as fome fathers treat children, and as other fathers do lay-men,, exacting their belief of whatB 5

ever

ever they relate, on no other foundation than their own authority, without ever taking the pains of adapting their lies to human credulity, and of calculating them for the meridian of a common understanding; but with as much weaknefs as wickedness, and with more impudence often than either, they affert facts contrary to the honour of God, to the visible order of the creation, to the known laws of nature, to the histories of former ages, and to the experience of our own, and which no man can at once understand and believe.

If it fhould be objected (and it can no where be objected better than where I now write *, as there is no where more pomp of bigotry) that whole nations have been firm believers in fuch most abfurd fuppofitions; I reply, the fact is not true. They have known nothing of the matter, and have believed they knew not what. It is, indeed, with me no matter of doubt, but that the pope and his clergy might teach

* At Lisbon.

any

any of those Christian Heterodoxies, the tenets of which are the moft diametrically oppofite to their own; nay, all the doctrines of Zoroafter, Confucius, and Mahomet, not only with certain and immediate fuccefs, but without one catholick in a thousand knowing he had changed his religion.

WHAT motive a man can have to fit down, and to draw forth a lift of ftupid, fenfelefs, incredible lies upon paper, would be difficult to determine, did not Vanity present herself so immediately as the adequate cause. The vanity of knowing more than other men is, perhaps, befides hunger, the only inducement to writing, at least to publishing, at all: why then fhould not the voyagewriter be inflamed with the glory of having feen what no man ever did or will fee but himfelf? This is the true fource of the wonderful, in the difcourse and writings, and fometimes, I believe, in the actions of men. There is another fault of a kind directly oppofite to this, to which thefe writers are B 6 fome

fometimes liable, when, instead of filling their pages with monfters which no body hath ever feen, and with adventures which never have nor could poffibly have happened to them, they wafte their time and paper with recording things and facts of fo common a kind, that they challenge no other right of being remembered, than as they had the honour of having happened to the author, to whom nothing feems trivial that in any manner happens to himself. Of fuch confequence do his own actions appear to one of this kind, that he would probably think himself guilty of infidelity, fhould he omit the minutest thing in the detail of his journal. That the fact is true, is fufficient to give it a place there, without any confideration whether it is capable of pleafing or furprifing, of diverting or informing the rea

der.

.

I HAVE feen a play (if I mistake not, it is one of Mrs. Behn's, or of Mrs. Centlivre's) where this vice in a voyagewriter is finely ridiculed. An ignorant

pedant,