Page:The Last Days of Pompeii - Bulwer-Lytton - Volume 1.djvu/17

 recall the Past to behold; equally important and more deeply interesting are the passions, the crimes, the misfortunes, and reverses that might have chanced to the shades we thus summon to life. We understand any epoch of the world but ill, if we do not examine its romance ;—there is as much truth in the poetry of life as in its prose.

As the greatest difficulty in treating of an unfamiliar and distant period, is to make the characters introduced 'live and move' before the eye of the reader, so such should doubtless be the first object of a work of the present description:—and all attempts at the display of learning should be considered but as means subservient to this, the main, requisite of fiction. The first art of the Poet (the Creator) is to breathe the breath of life into his creatures—the next is to make their words and actions appropriate to the era in which they are to speak and act. This last art is perhaps the better effected by not bringing the art itself constantly before the reader—by not crowding the page with quotations, and the margin with notes. Perpetual references to learned authorities have, in fiction, something at once wearisome and arrogant. They appear like the author's eulogies