are more nice than wise. Come,
Miss Morland, let us leave him to meditate over our faults in the utmost
propriety of diction, while we praise Udolpho in whatever terms we
like best. It is a most interesting work. You are fond of that kind of
reading?"

"To say the truth, I do not much like any other."

"Indeed!"

"That is, I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and
do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be
interested in. Can you?"

"Yes, I am fond of history."

"I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me
nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and
kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for
nothing, and hardly any women at all--it is very tiresome: and yet I
often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it
must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths,
their thoughts and designs--the chief of all this must be invention, and
invention is what delights me in other books."

"Historians, you think," said Miss Tilney, "are not happy in their
flights of fancy. They display imagination without raising interest. I
am fond of history--and am very well contented to take the false with
the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence
in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on,
I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under one's own
observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are
embellishments, and I like them as such. If a speech be well drawn up,
I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made--and probably with
much greater, if the production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson, than if
the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, or Alfred the Great."

"You are fond of history! And so are Mr. Allen and my father; and I have
two brothers who do not dislike it. So many instances within my small
circle of friends is remarkable! At this rate, I shall not pity the
writers of history any longer. If people like to read their books, it
is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes,
which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be
labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck
me as a hard fate; and though I know it is all very right and necessary,
I have often wondered at the person's courage that could sit down on
pur