The plays of Shakespeare which are based upon the chronicles of English kings are grouped in the Folio edition of the dramatic works as “Histories.” It will not surprise any reader, who happens not to have thought of it before, to learn that the episodes in “Henry IV” and “Henry V” do not follow the actual course of events in the reigns of the real kings; we take it for granted that Shakespeare meant to write historical fiction, and we read the plays as creations of the poetic imagination. But many readers will be surprised to hear that most works which we call historic are likewise figments of the imagination, and that we should read many of them in somewhat the same spirit as we read the historical plays of Shakespeare or good historical novels. Not only do we get the most pleasure out of the great historians by regarding their works as pieces of artistic writing, but we save ourselves from the error of accepting their narratives as fact. For it is generally true that the more glowing, the more imaginative, the more architectural a work of history, the more it is open to suspicion that it is not an exact account of true events. In taking this position we are not appropriating to the uses of literary enjoyment works of information that should be left among the dictionaries and encyclopedias; we are only obeying the best critical historians, who warn us not to believe the accepted masterpieces of history, but allow us to enjoy them. And enjoyment is what we seek and value. The conception of history as the work of the imagination was held by all the older historians. Bacon said that poetry is “feigned history.” That is, he conceived that the methods of poetry and history are the same and that the difference lies in the material, the poet inventing the substance of his story, the historian finding his substance in the recorded events of the past. This view of history obtained up to the nineteenth century. Macaulay said that history is a compound of poetry and philosophy. And Carlyle thought it proper to designate as a history his “French Revolution,” a work based on certain facts in history but consisting in large part of dramatic fiction, philosophic reflection, and political argument. In the last hundred years there has grown up a view of history as a science, the purpose of which is to examine the evidences of the past in human life as the geologist studies the past of the physical globe on which we live. The new school of history is comparatively so young that it has not produced many writers of high rank in eloquence and literary power, whereas poetic history is as old as literature and includes the work of many great masters. These masters live by their eloquence; for it is eloquence rather than mere truth to fact that gives a work a permanent place in literature. So our knowledge of historic events must come to us, the world of general readers, in large part from historians who were great artists rather than accurate scholars.