Page:George Chapman, a critical essay (IA georgechapmancri00swin).pdf/126

seven years earlier than Bussy in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Chapman's apology for the attribution of this name to the apparently imaginary avenger of his brother's blood is better worth remembering than such inquiries are worth pursuing. "Poor envious souls they are," says the poet, "that cavil at truth's want in these natural fictions;" a reasonable and memorable protest against the perverse or senseless paradox which confounds truth with fact, and refuses to distinguish veracity from reality; and which would not be worth the passing notice of a contemptuous instant, if men of genius would forbear to confuse the minds of their feebler and more servile admirers by the adoption and promulgation in the loudest tones of prophecy of such blatant and vacuous babble about "kinship of fiction to lying" and so forth as should properly be left to the lips of the dunces who may naturally believe it, being thick-witted enough to accept as serious reasoning and deliberate opinion the most wilful and preposterous paradoxes thundered forth from pulpit or from tripod in the most riotous and ludi-