I [GETS OF THE CHURCH AND SdKN< i: vi 



Kind'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 narrative may be partly true and partly 

 false. Thus, some histories of the time tell us 

 what the King said, and what Bishop Juxon said ; 

 >i report royalist conspiracies to effect a rescue ; or 

 K'tail the motives which induced the chiefs of the 

 Commonwealth to resolve that the King should 

 .lie. 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- 

 1 rary pictorial representations of both these modes 

 of procedure. Such narratives, while veracious as 

 to tin- main event, may and do exhibit various 



rces of unconscious and conscious misrepre- 

 uppression, and invention, till they 

 become hardly distinguishable from pure fictions. 

 Thus, they present a transition to narratives of a 

 third class, in which the fictitious element pn- 

 dominates. Here, again, there are all imaginable 



latious, from such works as Defoe's quasi - 

 hish.ri.-al aeonmt of the Plague year, which prob- 

 ably gives a truer conception of that dreadful time 

 than any authentic history, through the historical 

 n"\' 1. drama, and epic, to the purely phantasmal 

 of imaginative genius, such as the old 

 ribiao Nights" MI- the modem "Shaving >f 

 1 " It is not strictly needful tor my present 



