You will pardon me, sir, said Arabella, if I recur to your own principles:
You allow that experience may be gained by books: and certainly there is no part of knowledge in which we are obliged to trust them more than in descriptive geography.
The most restless activity in the longest life can survey but a small part of the habitable globe: and the rest can only be known from the report of others.
Universal negatives are seldom safe, and are least to be allowed when the disputes are about objects of sense; where one position cannot be inferred from another.
That there is a castle, any man who has seen it may safely affirm. But you cannot, with equal reason, maintain that there is no castle, because you have not seen it.
Why should I imagine that the face of the earth is altered since the time of those heroines, who experienced so many changes of uncouth captivity?
Castles, indeed, are the works of art; and are therefore subject to decay. But lakes, and caverns, and deserts, must always remain.
And why, since you call for instances, should I not dread the misfortunes which happened to the divine Clelia, who was carried to one of the isles of the Thrasymenian lake?
Or those which befell the beautiful Candace, queen of Ethiopia, whom the pirate Zenodorus wandered with on the seas?
Or the accidents which embittered the life of the incomparable Cleopatra?