Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 18.djvu/19



HERE is nothing received with more pleasure in history, than the minute passages and circumstances of such facts as are extraordinary and surprising. We often lament to see an important accident nakedly told, stripped of those particularities which are most entertaining and instructive in such relations. This defect is frequent in all historians, not through their own fault, but for want of information. For while facts are fresh in memory, nobody takes care to record them, as thinking it idle to inform the world in what they know already; and by this means the accounts we have of them are only traditional, the circumstances forgotten, and perhaps supplied with false ones, or formed upon probabilities, according to the genius of the writer.

But, beside the informing posterity on such occasions, there is something due to the present age. People at distance are curious and concerned to know the particulars of great events, as well as those in the metropolis; and so are the neighbouring nations. And the relations they receive are usually either very imperfect, or misrepresented on purpose by the prejudice of party in the relators.

I shall endeavour to avoid both these errours, in the fact I am going to relate; and, having made use Rh