their blood, and filling them up with water. Doth not every one, who is
the least versed in physical history, know that Spain was not the
country in which this doctor lived? The same writer hath likewise erred
in the country of his archbishop, as well as that of those great
personages whose understandings were too sublime to taste anything but
tragedy, and in many others. The same mistakes may likewise be observed
in Scarron, the Arabian Nights, the History of Marianne and le Paisan
Parvenu, and perhaps some few other writers of this class, whom I have
not read, or do not at present recollect; for I would by no means be
thought to comprehend those persons of surprizing genius, the authors of
immense romances, or the modern novel and Atalantis writers; who,
without any assistance from nature or history, record persons who never
were, or will be, and facts which never did, nor possibly can, happen;
whose heroes are of their own creation, and their brains the chaos
whence all their materials are selected. Not that such writers deserve
no honour; so far otherwise, that perhaps they merit the highest; for
what can be nobler than to be as an example of the wonderful extent of
human genius? One may apply to them what Balzac says of Aristotle, that
they are a second nature (for they have no communication with the first;
by which, authors of an inferior class, who cannot stand alone, are
obliged to support themselves as with crutches); but these of whom I am
now speaking seem to be possessed of those stilts, which the excellent
Voltaire tells us, in his letters, "carry the genius far off, but with
an regular pace." Indeed, far out of the sight of the reader,

Beyond the realm of Chaos and old Night.

But to return to the former class, who are contented to copy nature,
instead of forming originals from the confused heap of matter in their
own brains, is not such a book as that which records the achievements of