to measure the height of the stars. How often, think you, do the
physicians lie, when they aver things good for sicknesses, which
afterwards send Charon a great number of souls drowned in a potion
before they come to his ferry. And no less of the rest which take
upon them to affirm. Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and
therefore never lieth; for, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that
to be true which is false: so as the other artists, and especially
the historian, affirmeth many things, can, in the cloudy knowledge
of mankind, hardly escape from many lies: but the poet, as I said
before, never affirmeth; the poet never maketh any circles about
your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he
writeth: he citeth not authorities of other histories, but even for
his entry calleth the sweet Muses to inspire into him a good
invention; in troth, not labouring to tell you what is or is not,
but what should or should not be. And, therefore, though he recount
things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true he lieth
not; without we will say that Nathan lied in his speech, before
alleged, to David; which, as a wicked man durst scarce say, so think
I none so simple would say, that AEsop lied in the tales of his
beasts; for who thinketh that AEsop wrote it for actually true, were
well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth
of. What child is there that cometh to a play, and seeing Thebes
written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is
Thebes? If then a man can arrive to the child's age, to know that
the poet's persons and doings are but pictures what should be, and
not stories what have been, they will never give the lie to things
not affirmatively, but allegorically and figuratively written; and
therefore, as in history, looking for truth, they may go away full
fraught with falsehood, so in poesy, looking but for fiction, they
shall use the narration but as an imaginative ground-plot of a