244 PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS. 



aginary additions, passed insensibly into a maker of tales. 

 Even children, at first anxious to know whether the stories 

 told them are true, by and by become ready to accept untrue 

 stories; and then some of them, thus taught by example, 

 invent wonderful tales to interest their companions. With 

 the uncivilized or semi-civilized a like genesis naturally 

 occurs among adults. Hence the established class of story 

 tellers in the East authors of oral fictions. And how grad 

 ually by this process fiction is differentiated from biogra 

 phy, is shown by the fact that at first these stories which, 

 as exaggerations of actual incidents, are partially believed 

 in by the narrators, are wholly believed in by the listeners. 

 In his Two Years Residence in a Levantine Family Mr. 

 Bayle St. John tells us that when The Arabian Nights were 

 being read aloud, and when he warned those around that 

 they must not suppose the narratives to be true, they insisted 

 on believing them: asking Why should a man sit down 

 to write lies? So that after fiction comes into existence it 

 is still classed as biography is not distinguished from it as 

 among civilized nations. 



The early history of these civilized nations shows that in 

 the genesis of imaginary biography the priesthood at first 

 took some part. In Stephen s time Wace, a reading clerk, 

 was also a romance writer. So, too, we have Archdeacon 

 Walter Map, who wrote religious and secular romances ; and 

 there are subsequently named romances which probably 

 had clerical authors though there is no proof. But the gen 

 eral aspect of the facts appears to show that after that time 

 in England, the telling of tales of imagination became secu 

 larized. 



Meanwhile derivative forms of literature were showing 

 themselves, mostly, however, having a biographical element. 

 After the Conquest Ssewulf, who, becoming a monk, wrote 

 his travels, gives us a deviation into an autobiographical, 

 as well as a geographical, form of literature. Then in Kich- 

 ard I s reign we have Nigel Wireker, a monastic who wrote 



