narch sitting with ivory sceptre in the Marketplace
dealing out genial justice. Or again, when the wild mood is on, we can
hear the crash of the spears, the rattle of the armour as the heroes
fall, and the plunging of the horses among the slain. Could we enter the
palace of an old Ionian lord, we know what we should see there; we know
the words in which he would address us. We could meet Hector as a
friend. If we could choose a companion to spend an evening with over a
fireside, it would be the man of many counsels, the husband of Penelope.

I am not going into the vexed question whether History or Poetry is the
more true. It has been sometimes said that Poetry is the more true,
because it can make things more like what our moral sense would prefer
they should be. We hear of poetic justice and the like, as if nature and
fact were not just enough.

I entirely dissent from that view. So far as Poetry attempts to improve
on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself.
Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer
whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is
studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to
have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, that
those magnificent speeches of Wolsey are taken exactly, with no more
change than the metre makes necessary, from Cavendish's Life.
Marlborough read Shakespeare for English history, and read nothing else.
The poet only is not bound, when it is inconvenient, to what may be
called the accidents of facts. It was enough for Shakespeare to know
that Prince Hal in his youth had lived among loose companions, and the
tavern in Eastcheap came in to fill out his picture; although Mrs.
Quickly and Falstaff, and Poins and Bardolph were more likely to have
been fallen in with by Shakespeare himself at the Mermaid, than to have
been comrades of the true Prince Henry. It was enough for Shakespeare to
draw real men, and the situation, whatever it might be, would sit easy
on them. In this sense only it is that Poetry is truer than History,
that it can make a picture more complete. It may take liberties with
time and space, and give the action distinctness by throwing it into
more manageable compass.

But it may not alter the real conditions of things, or represent life as
other than it is. The greatness of the poet depends on his being true to
nature, without insisting that nature shall