biographies of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his best; in Pliny's
Natural History; in Hanno's Periplus; in all the early chronicles;
in the Lives of the Saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas Malory; in
the travels of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus, and Aldrovandus, and
Conrad Lycosthenes, with his magnificent Prodigiorum et Ostentorum
Chronicon; in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in the
memoirs of Casanova; in Defoe's History of the Plague; in Boswell's
Life of Johnson; in Napoleon's despatches, and in the works of our
own Carlyle, whose French Revolution is one of the most fascinating
historical novels ever written, facts are either kept in their
proper subordinate position, or else entirely excluded on the
general ground of dulness. Now, everything is changed. Facts are
not merely finding a footing-place in history, but they are
usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of
Romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are
vulgarising mankind. The crude commercialism of America, its
materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of
things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable
ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its
national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was
incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the
story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm,
and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the
whole of literature.'

CYRIL. My dear boy!

VIVIAN. I assure you it is the case, and the amusing part of the
whole thing is that the story of the cherry-tree is an absolute
myth. However, you must not think that I am too despondent about