The first example and perhaps the source of this whole species of narrative is the "True History" of Lucian, which, is professedly fabulous and satiric. Lucian says that by his seas of milk and islands of cheese and the like, he is ridiculing the extravagant relations of the old poets and historians who tell incredible tales. Hundreds of years after Lucian, Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville by their marvelous accounts of remote countries set themselves in the class Lucian satirized. But we will take them up later, since they were real travellers simply exaggerating what they had seen in order the more surely to please a perverted historical taste. We are dealing now with acknowledged imagination. There are many famous imaginary voyages professedly satiric besides Lucian's. Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac's "History of the States and Empires of the Moon" is a satire on the pedantry and scholastic disputations of his age, the early seventeenth century, concerning the uninhabitableness of the lunar world. To the moon Bergerac makes an excursion and settles matters for himself. "Niel Klim's Underground Journey," by Ludvig Holberg of Denmark, is another famous imaginary trip. [Swift and Defoe] But no nation has surpassed England, and none indeed has even equalled her, in the production of this class of stories. "Gulliver's Travels," "Gaudentio de Lucca," and "Robinson Crusoe" are supreme. Swift's marvelous tale is, of course, satire; Berkley's extravagant one, philosophy and polemic; Defoe's seemingly true narration, religious dissent. But in the minds of the critics--and in the mind of every school boy, I suppose--there is the judgment that Defoe succeeded in writing the best pure "story" story in all the world. On the one hand, accordingly, by its content of a sea voyage and a wreck on an unknown shore and by the controversial purpose of its author, and by the fact that it became the progenitor of a long line of marvelous narratives, the story of "Robinson Crusoe" links itself with the species of imaginary voyages and stands forth as the highest, though because of its virtues not the most representative, attainment of the class. On the other hand, "Robinson Crusoe" by its unaffected simplicity of diction, by its many minute circumstances, by its particularity as to persons, places, dates, and references, stands at the head as the greatest and best representative of another type of narratives,--the story of probable adventures. But one would finally class Defoe's story with realistic romance. More typical of the present species, because more extravagant and not so seemingly actual, is the somewhat charming though long-forgotten story of the "Voyage of Peter Wilkins," written about 1750 by R. Paltock or Pultock. In this narrative the author created a new species of beings, which have been ranked among the most beautiful offsprings of imagination. In the "Curse of Kehama" Southey acknowledged them as the origin of the Glendoveers,