202 LIGHTS OF THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE vi 



King's head cut off; and that there would have re- 

 mained in his mind an idea of that occurrence 

 which he would have put into words of the same 

 value as those which we use to express it. 



Or the joarratiYe may be partly tr.ua.- and -partly 

 falsa Thus, some histories of the time tell us 

 what the King said, and what Bishop Juxon said ; 

 or report royalist conspiracies to effect a rescue ; or 

 detail the motives which induced the chiefs of the 

 Commonwealth to resolve that the King should 

 die. One account declares that the King knelt 

 at a high block, another that he lay down with 

 his neck on a mere plank. And there are contem- 

 porary pictorial representations of both these modes 

 of procedure. Such narratives, while veracious as 

 to the main event, may and do exhibit various 

 degrees of unconscious and conscious misrepre- 

 sentation, suppression, and invention, till they 

 become hardly distinguishable from pure fictions. 

 Thus, they present a transition to narratives of a 

 third class, in which the fkjitiouj^e^^ 

 dpjnm_ates. Here, again, tEere are all imaginable 

 gradations, from such works as Defoe's quasi- 

 historical account of the Plague year, which prob- 

 ably gives a truer conception of that dreadful time 

 than any authentic history, through the historical 

 novel, drama, and epic, to the purely phantasmal 

 creations of imaginative genius, such as the old 

 "Arabian Nights" or the modern "6having of 

 Shagpat." It is not strictly needful for my present. 



