express it.

Or the narrative may be partly true and partly false. Thus, some
histories of the time tell us what the King said, and what
Bishop Juxon said; or report royalist conspiracies to effect a
rescue; or detail the motives which induced the chiefs of the
Commonwealth to resolve that the King should die. One account
declares that the King knelt at a high block, another that he
lay down with his neck on a mere plank. And there are
contemporary pictorial representations of both these modes of
procedure. Such narratives, while veracious as to the main
event, may and do exhibit various degrees of unconscious and
conscious misrepresentation, suppression, and invention, till
they become hardly distinguishable from pure fictions.
Thus, they present a transition to narratives of a third class,
in which the fictitious element predominates. Here, again, there
are all imaginable gradations, from such works as Defoe's quasi-
historical account of the Plague year, which probably gives a
truer conception of that dreadful time than any authentic
history, through the historical novel, drama, and epic, to the
purely phantasmal creations of imaginative genius, such as the
old "Arabian Nights" or the modern "Shaving of Shagpat." It is
not strictly needful for my present purpose that I should say
anything about narratives which are professedly fictitious.
Yet it may be well, perhaps, if I disclaim any intention of
derogating from their value, when I insist upon the paramount
necessity of recollecting that there is no sort of relation
between the ethical, or the aesthetic, or even the scientific
importance of such works, and their worth as historical
documents. Unquestionably, to the poetic artist, or even to the