723 IT has become fashionable in these enlightened times, to treat historical subjects agreeably to the opinion of nine-tenths of the world, and exhibit its characters and their actions in the fascinating dress of Romance, rather than in the sober language of unvarnished narrative. Indeed, some people have gone so far as to pronounce his tory to be but a graver species of fiction, because it has happened that two different writers, when treating of one and the same matter, have represented it in the most opposite lights. Even the events with which we are contemporary, are blazoned forth by the champions of self-interest, and the hirelings of faction, in statements as contradictory as are truth and falsehood. Now, if things which pass under our own observation, and about which our senses cannot deceive us, be so glaringly misrepresented; the worthies who question the veracity of genuine history, and treat it altogether as Ro mance will find that these volumes are constructed so as to meet their doubts, and dissipate the objections they entertain against matters-of-fact that were contemporary with their forefathers, about six generations back. Since, then, nine-tenths of the world love rather to be entertained with this new method of reading history, we have even yielded to their opinion, and set forth various matters that happened two hundred years ago, in the colours of the modern historical melodrama. But it is necessary to advertise the reader, that we have given some latitude to Fancy, not with any view of distorting the truths we would communicate, but to connect the details of our narrative, much in the same way as the carpenters, who erected the Pavilion on Woolwich Common, gilded the ropes which support its canvas roof, rather for decoration, than for strength. We have not, however, allowed ourselves to be drawn by the dominion of Fancy, beyond the line of demarcation which Fiction has prescribed for her ablest artists. Of all these matters, however, the fourteen millions of the British Em |
