Muse! For all your grave airs and high pretensions, you are not a whit more trustworthy than some of your lighter sisters on whom your partisans look down. You bid me listen to a general's oration to his soldiers. Nonsense! He no more made it than Turpin made his dying speech at Newgate. You pronounce a panegyric of a hero; I doubt it, and say you flatter outrageously, You utter the condemnation of a loose character; I doubt it, and think you are prejudiced and take the side of the Dons. You offer me an autobiography; I doubt all autobiographies I ever read except those, perhaps, of Mr. Robinson Crusoe, Mariner, and writers of his class. These have no object in setting themselves right with the public or their own consciences, these have no motive for concealment or half truths, these call for no more confidence than I can cheerfully give, and do not force me to tax my credulity or to fortify it by evidence. I take up a volume of Dr. Smollett, or a volume of the "Spectator," and say the fiction carries a greater amount of truth in solution than the volume which purports to be all true. Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life of the time; of the manners, of the movement, the dress, the pleasures, the laughter, the ridicules of society—the old times live again, and I travel in the old country of England. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?
As we read in these delightful volumes of the "Tatler"
