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 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