 of this
Contempt, that hath made us so cautiously avoid the Term Romance, a Name with
which we might otherwise have been well enough contented. Though as we have good
Authority for all our Characters, no less indeed than the vast authentic
Doomsday-Book of Nature, as is elsewhere hinted, our Labours have sufficient
Title to the Name of History. Certainly they deserve some Distinction from those
Works, which one of the wittiest of Men regarded only as proceeding from a
Pruritus, or indeed rather from a Looseness of the Brain.
    But besides the Dishonour which is thus cast on one of the most useful as
well as entertaining of all Kinds of Writing, there is just Reason to apprehend,
that by encouraging such Authors, we shall propagate much Dishonour of another
Kind; I mean to the Characters of many good and valuable Members of Society: For
the dullest Writers, no more than the dullest Companions, are always
inoffensive. They have both enough of Language to be indecent and abusive. And
surely if the Opinion just above cited be true, we cannot wonder, that Works so
nastily derived should be nasty themselves, or have a Tendency to make others
so.
    To prevent therefore for the future, such intemperate Abuses of Leisure, of
Letters, and of the Liberty of the Press, especially as the World seems at
present to be more than usually threatned with them, I shall here venture to
mention some Qualifications, every one of which are in a pretty high Degree
necessary to this Order of Historians.
    The first is Genius, without a full Vein of which, no Study, says Horace,
can avail us. By Genius I would understand that Power, or rather those Powers of
the Mind, which are capable of penetrating into all Things within our Reach and
Knowledge, and of distinguishing their essential Differences. These are no other
than Invention and Judgment; and they are both called by the collective Name of
Genius, as they are of those Gifts of Nature which we bring with us into the
World. Concerning each of which many seem to have fallen into very great Errors:
For by Invention, I believe, is generally understood a creative Faculty; which
would indeed prove most Romance-Writers to have the highest Pretensions to it;
whereas by Invention is really meant no more, (and so the Word signifies) than
Discovery, or finding out; or to explain it at large, a quick and sagacious
Penetration into the true Essence of all the Objects of our Contemplation. This,
I think, can rarely exist without the Concomitancy of Judgment: For how we can
be said to have
