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 should
be objected (and it can nowhere be objected better than where I now
write, [12] as there is nowhere more pomp of bigotry) that whole nations
have been firm believers in such most absurd suppositions, 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 any of those Christian
heterodoxies, the tenets of which are the most diametrically opposite to
their own; nay, all the doctrines of Zoroaster, Confucius, and Mahomet,
not only with certain and immediate success, but without one Catholic in
a thousand knowing he had changed his religion.

[Footnote 12: At Lisbon.]

What motive a man can have to sit down, and to draw forth a list of
stupid, senseless, 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, besides
hunger, the only inducement to writing, at least to publishing, at all.
Why then should not the voyage-writer be inflamed with the glory of
having seen what no man ever did or will see but himself? This is
the true source of the wonderful in the discourse and writings, and
sometimes, I believe, in the actions of men. There is another fault, of
a kind directly opposite to this, to which these writers are sometimes
liable, when, instead of filling their pages with monsters which nobody
hath ever seen, and with adventures which never have, nor could possibly
have, happened to them, waste their time and paper with recording things
and facts of so common a kind, that they challenge no other right of
being remembered than as they had the honor of having happened to the
author, to whom nothing seems trivial that in any manner happens to
himself.

Of such consequence do his own actions appear to one of this kind, that
he would probably think himself guilty of infidelity should he omit the
minutest thing in the detail of his journal. That the fact is true is
sufficient to give it a place there, without any consideration whether
it is capable of pleasing or surprising, of diverting or informing, the
reader. I have seen a play (if I mistake not it is one of Mrs. Beh