would allow, I believe, at this day.

But, in reality, the Odyssey, the Telemachus, and all of that kind, are
to the voyage-writing I here intend, what romance is to true history,
the former being the confounder and corrupter of the latter. I am far
from supposing that Homer, Hesiod, and the other ancient poets and
mythologists, had any settled design to pervert and confuse the records
of antiquity; but it is certain they have effected it; and for my part I
must confess I should have honored and loved Homer more had he written
a true history of his own times in humble prose, than those noble poems
that have so justly collected the praise of all ages; for, though I read
these with more admiration and astonishment, I still read Herodotus,
Thucydides, and Xenophon with more amusement and more satisfaction. The
original poets were not, however, without excuse. They found the limits
of nature too straight 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 simple to afford that variety
which they have since offered in vain to the choice of the meanest
writers. In doing this they are again excusable for the manner in which
they have done it.

Ut speciosa dehine miracula promant.

They are not, indeed, so properly said to turn reality into fiction,
as fiction into reality. Their paintings are so bold, their colors so
strong, that everything they touch seems to exist in the very manner
they represent it; their portraits are so just, and their landscapes so
beautiful, that we acknowledge the strokes of nature in both, without
inquiring 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 such pretensions to indulgence; they lie for lying sake,
or in order insolently to impose the most monstrous improbabilities and
absurdities upon their readers on their own authority; treating them as
some fathers treat children, and as other fathers do laymen, exacting
their belief of whatever they relate, on no other foundation than their
own authority, without ever taking the pains or 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 assert facts contrary to the honor of
God, to the