You may with ease. Fabulous History holds place, side by side, with True History, as a rival in dignity, credence, and power, and in peopling the Earth with Persons and Events. For, of a verity, the Personages and Events created by Poesy hold place in our Mind--not in our Imagination only, but in our Understanding, along with Events and Personages historically remembered. SEWARD. An imposing Parallelism! NORTH. It is--but does it hold good? And if it does--with what limitations? SEWARD. With what limitations, sir? NORTH. I wish Lord Bacon were here, that I might ask him to explain. Take Homer and Thucydides--the Iliad and the History of the Peloponnesian War. We thus sever, at the widest, the Telling of Calliope from the Telling of Clio, holding each at the height of honour. BULLER. At the widest? NORTH. Yes; for how far from Thucydides is, at once, the Book of the Games! Look through the Iliad, and see how much and minute depicturing of a World with which the Historian had nothing to do! Shall the Historian, in Prose, of the Ten Years' War, stop to describe the Funeral Games of a Patroclus? Yes; if he stop to describe the Burying of every Hero who falls. But the Historian in Prose assumes that a People know their own Manners, and therefore he omits painting their manners to themselves. The Historian in Verse assumes the same thing, and, _therefore_, strange to say, he paints the manners! See, then, in the Iliad, how much memorising of a whole departed scheme of human existence, with which the Prose Historian had nothing to do, the Historian in regulated Metre has had the inspiration and the skill to inweave in the narrative of his ever-advancing Action. BULLER. Would his lordship were with us! NORTH. Give all this to--THE HEXAMETER. Remember always, my dear Seward, the shield of Achilles--itself a world in miniature--a compendium of the world. SEWARD. Of the universe. NORTH. Even so; for Sun, and Moon, and Stars are there, Astronomy and all the learned sisterhood! SEWARD. Then to what species of narrative in prose--to one removed at what interval from the history of the Peloponnesian War, belongs that scene of Helen on the Walls of Troy? That scene at the Scæan gate? In the tent of Achilles, where Achilles sits, and Priam kneels? NORTH. Good. The general difference is obviously this--Publicity almost solely stamps the Thucydidean story--Privacy, more than in equal part, interfused with Publicity, the Homeric. You must allow Publicity and Privacy to signify, besides that which is done in public and in private, that which proceeds of the Public and of the Private will. SEWARD. In other words, if I apprehend you aright, the Theme given being some affair of Public moment, Prose tends to gather up the acts of the individual agents, under general aspects, into masses. NORTH.