Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon | Page 7

active passion constantly employed in its service. This,
indeed, it is in the power of every traveler to gratify; but it is the
leading principle in weak minds only.
To render his relation agreeable to the man of sense, it is therefore
necessary that the voyager should possess several eminent and rare
talents; so rare indeed, that it is almost wonderful to see them ever

united in the same person. And if all these talents must concur in the
relator, they are certainly in a more eminent degree necessary to the
writer; for here the narration admits of higher ornaments of style, and
every fact and sentiment offers itself to the fullest and most deliberate
examination. It would appear, therefore, I think, somewhat strange if
such writers as these should be found extremely common; since nature
hath been a most parsimonious distributor of her richest talents, and
hath seldom bestowed many on the same person. But, on the other hand,
why there should scarce exist a single writer of this kind worthy our
regard; and, whilst there is no other branch of history (for this is history)
which hath not exercised the greatest pens, why this alone should be
overlooked by all men of great genius and erudition, and delivered up
to the Goths and Vandals as their lawful property, is altogether as
difficult to determine. And yet that this is the case, with some very few
exceptions, is most manifest. Of these I shall willingly admit Burnet
and Addison; if the former was not, perhaps, to be considered as a
political essayist, and the latter as a commentator on the classics, rather
than as a writer of travels; which last title, perhaps, they would both of
them have been least ambitious to affect. Indeed, if these two and two
or three more should be removed from the mass, there would remain
such a heap of dullness behind, that the appellation of voyage-writer
would not appear very desirable. I am not here unapprised that old
Homer himself is by some considered as a voyage-writer; and, indeed,
the beginning of his Odyssey may be urged to countenance that opinion,
which I shall not controvert. But, whatever species of writing the
Odyssey is of, it is surely at the head of that species, as much as the
Iliad is of another; and so far the excellent Longinus would allow, I
believe, at this day.
But, in reality, the Odyssey, the Telemachus, and all of that kind, are to
the voyage-writing I here intend, what romance is to true history, the
former being the confounder and corrupter of the latter. I am far from
supposing that Homer, Hesiod, and the other ancient poets and
mythologists, had any settled design to pervert and confuse the records
of antiquity; but it is certain they have effected it; and for my part I
must confess I should have honored and loved Homer more had he
written a true history of his own times in humble prose, than those
noble poems that have so justly collected the praise of all ages; for,

though I read these with more admiration and astonishment, I still read
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon with more amusement and
more satisfaction. The original poets were not, however, without
excuse. They found the limits of nature too straight for the immensity
of their genius, which they had not room to exert without extending
fact by fiction: and that especially at a time when the manners of men
were too simple to afford that variety which they have since offered in
vain to the choice of the meanest writers. In doing this they are again
excusable for the manner in which they have done it.
Ut speciosa dehine miracula promant.
They are not, indeed, so properly said to turn reality into fiction, as
fiction into reality. Their paintings are so bold, their colors so strong,
that everything they touch seems to exist in the very manner they
represent it; their portraits are so just, and their landscapes so beautiful,
that we acknowledge the strokes of nature in both, without inquiring
whether Nature herself, or her journeyman the poet, formed the first
pattern of the piece. But other writers (I will put Pliny at their head)
have no such pretensions to indulgence; they lie for lying sake, or in
order insolently to impose the most monstrous improbabilities and
absurdities upon their readers on their own authority; treating them as
some fathers treat children, and as other fathers do laymen, exacting
their belief of whatever they relate, on no other foundation than their
own authority, without ever taking the pains or adapting their lies to
human credulity, and of calculating them for the meridian of a common
understanding; but, with as much weakness as wickedness, and with
more impudence often