HISTORY AND FICTION.
The archbishop of Canterbury once put the following question to Betterton, the actor: “How is it that you players, who deal only with things imaginary, affect your auditors as if they were real; while we preachers, who deal only with things real, affect our auditors as if they were imaginary?” “It is, my lord,” replied the player, “because we actors speak of things imaginary as if they were real, while you preachers too often speak of things real as if they were imaginary.” Whitefield used to tell this anecdote as an explanation of his own vehement and dramatic style of preaching. The remark may be applied to historical and fictitious writing. The old school historians were so solid and stately that they conveyed only feeble images to the mind, while poets and romancers out of airy nothings have created living and breathing beings. How much more readily we remember romance than history, and yet “truth is stranger than fiction.” Shakspeare’s Macbeth and Richard are not the Macbeth and Richard of history, yet we cling to the poet’s portraits of them, and discard the sober truth. “Macbeth,” Sir Walter Scott tells us, “broke no law of hospitality in his attempt on Duncan’s life. He attacked and slew the king at a place called Bothgowan, or the Smith’s house, near Elgin, in 1039, and not, as has been supposed, in his own castle of Inverness. The act was bloody, as was the complexion of the times; but in very truth, the claim of Macbeth to the throne, according to the rules of Scottish succession, was better than that of Duncan. As a king, the tyrant so much exclaimed against, was, in realty, a firm, just and equitable prince. Early authorities show us no such persons as Banquo and his son Fleance, nor have we reason to think that the latter ever fled further from Macbeth than across the flat scene according to the stage direction. Neither were Banquo or his son ancestors of the house of Stuart. All these things are now known, but the mind retains pertinaciously the impressions made by the imposition of genius. While the works of Shakspeare are read, and the English language exists, history may say what she will, but the general reader will only recollect Macbeth as the sacrilegious usurper and Richard as the deformed murderer.”