said by Johnson in his latter days, with admission of like fault in
the convention to which he had once conformed: "If Robertson's
style is bad, that is to say, too big words and too many of them, I
am afraid he caught it of me." Lucian would have dealt as
mercilessly with that later style as Archibald Campbell, ship's
purser and son of an Edinburgh Professor, who used the form of one
of Lucian's dialogues, "Lexiphanes," for an assault of ridicule upon
pretentious sentence-making, and helped a little to get rid of it.
Lucian laughed in his day at small imitators of the manner of
Thucydides, as he would laugh now at the small imitators of the
manner of Macaulay. He bade the historian first get sure facts,
then tell them in due order, simply and without exaggeration or toil
after fine writing; though he should aim not the less at an enduring
grace given by Nature to the Art that does not stray from her, and
simply speaks the highest truth it knows.

The endeavour of small Greek historians to add interest to their
work by magnifying the exploits of their countrymen, and piling
wonder upon wonder, Lucian first condemned in his "Instructions for
Writing History," and then caricatured in his "True History,"
wherein is contained the account of a trip to the moon, a piece
which must have been enjoyed by Rabelais, which suggested to Cyrano
de Bergerac his Voyages to the Moon and to the Sun, and insensibly
contributed, perhaps, directly or through Bergerac, to the
conception of "Gulliver's Travels." I have added the Icaro-
Menippus, because that Dialogue describes another trip to the moon,
though its satire is more especially directed against the
philosophers.

Menippus was born at Gadara in Coele-Syria, and from a slave he grew