ABSTRACT
History and romance are terms that have never been very clearly distinguished from each other. Narratives, whether fictitious or true, may relate to the processes of: nature, or the actions of men. An historian will relate the noises, the sights, and the smells that attend an eruption of Vesuvius. A romancer will describe, in the first place, the contemporary ebullitions and inflations, the combustion and decomposition that take place in the bowels of the earth. It must not be denied that, though history is a term commonly applied to a catalogue of natural appearances, as well as to the recital of human actions, romance is chiefly limited to the latter. Two contemporary and (so to speak) adjacent actions may both be faithfully described, because both may be witnessed; but the connection between them, that quality which constitutes one the effect of the other, is mere matter of conjecture, and comes within the province, not of history, but romance.
