BOOK I PART III
is a precaution, which is not required of comic
poets, whose personages and incidents, being
of a more familiar kind, enter easily into the
conception, and are received without any such
formality, even though at first night they be
known to be fictitious, and the pure offspring
of the fancy.
This mixture of truth and falshood in the fa-
bles of tragic poets not only serves our present
purpose, by shewing, that the imagination can
be satisfyed without any absolute belief or as-
surance; but may in another view be regarded
as a very strong confirmation of this system. It
is evident, that poets make use of this artifice
of borrowing the names of their persons, and
the chief events of their poems, from history, in
order to procure a more easy reception for the
whole, and cause it to make a deeper impres-