kind worthy our regard; and whilst there is no other branch of hiftory (for this is hiftory) which hath not exercised the greatest pens, why this alone fhould be overlooked by all men of great genius and erudition, and delivered up to the Goths and Vandals as their lawful property, is altogether as difficult to determine.

AND yet that this is the cafe, with fome very few exceptions, is moft manifeft. Of thefe I fhall willingly admit Burnet and Addifon; if the former was not perhaps to be confidered as a political effayift, and the latter as a commentator on the claffics, rather than as a writer of travels; which laft title perhaps they would both of them have been leaft ambitious to affect.

INDEED if these two, and two or three more, fhould be removed from the mafs, here would remain such a heap of dulnefs behind, that the appellation of voyage-writer would not appear very defirable.

I AM not here unapprized that old Homer himfelf is by fome confidered as a voyage-writer; and indeed the beginning

of

of his Odyffy may be urged to countenance that opinion, which I fhall not controvert. But whatever fpecies of writing the Odyffy is of, it is furely at the head of that fpecies, as much as the Iliad is of another; and fo far the excellent Longinus would allow, I believe, at this day,

BUT, in reality, the Odyffy, the Telemachus, and all of that kind, are to the voyage-writing. I here intend, what romance is to true hiftory, the former being the confounder and corrupter of 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 muft confefs I fhould have honoured and loved Homer more had he written a true hiftory of his own times in humble profe, than those noble poems that have fo juftly collected the praise of all ages; for though I read these with more admiration and astonishment, I ftill 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 immensity 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 said 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 so juft, and their landscapes fo beautiful, that we acknowledge the ftrokes of nature in both, without enquiring whether nature herself, or her journeyman the poet, formed the firft pattern of the piece.

BUT other writers (I will put Pliny at their head) have no fuch pretenfions to indulgence: they ly for lying fake, or in

order

order infolently to impofe 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 whatever 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 weakness 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 hiftories of former ages, and to the experience of our own, and which no man can at once understand and believe.

If it should 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 moft abfurd fuppofitions; I reply, the fact is not true They have known nothing of the matter] and have believed they knew not what

At Lisbon.

It is, indeed, with me no matter of doubt, but that the pope and his clergy might teach any of thofe Chriftian 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, caufe. 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 voyage-writer be inflamed with the glory of having feen what no man ever did or will fee but himself? This is the true fource of the wonderful, in the difcourfe and writings, and fometimes, I believe, in the actions of men. There is another fault of a kind directly oppofite to this, to which these writers are fometimes liable, when, inftead of filling

their