live Newcome's logs have been
put, and who is charged with the duty of making two octavo volumes out
of his friend's story, dresses up the narrative in his own way; utters
his own remarks in place of Newcome's; makes fanciful descriptions of
individuals and incidents with which he never could have been personally
acquainted; and commits blunders, which the critics will discover. A
great number of the descriptions in Cook's Voyages, for instance, were
notoriously invented by Dr. Hawkesworth, who "did" the book: so in the
present volumes, where dialogues are written down, which the reporter
could by no possibility have heard, and where motives are detected which
the persons actuated by them certainly never confided to the writer, the
public must once for all be warned that the author's individual fancy
very likely supplies much of the narrative; and that he forms it as
best he may, out of stray papers, conversations reported to him, and
his knowledge, right or wrong, of the characters of the persons engaged.
And, as is the case with the most orthodox histories, the writer's own
guesses or conjectures are printed in exactly the same type as the
most ascertained patent facts. I fancy, for my part, that the speeches
attributed to Clive, the Colonel, and the rest, are as authentic as the
orations in Sallust or Livy, and only implore the truth-loving public to
believe that incidents here told, and which passed very probably without
witnesses, were either confided to me subsequently as compiler of this
biography, or are of such a nature that they must have happened from
what we know happened after. For example, when you read such words
as QVE ROMANVS on a battered Roman stone, your profound antiquarian
knowledge enables you to assert that SENATVS POPVLVS was also inscribed
there at some time or other. You take a mutilated statue of Mars,
Bacchus, Apollo, or Virorum, and you pop him on a wanting hand, an
absent foot, or a nose which time or barbarians have defaced. You tell
your tales as you can, and state the facts as you think they must have
been. In this manner, Mr. James (historiographer to Her Majesty), Titus
Livius, Professor Alison, Robinson Crusoe, and all historians proceeded.
Blunders there must be in the best of these narratives, and more
asserted than they can possibly know or vouch for.

To recur to our own affairs, and the subject at present in hand, I am
obliged here to supply from conjecture a few points of the hi