ABSTRACT
The necessity then of borrowing from truth its colour at least, in favour of fiction, a point so justly recommended by Horace,1 and common sense, occured, at length, to some of our writers, who tried the experiment with success. To this new species of writing, the title of biography, humorously, and of course not improperly, assumed by the first ingenious author, has been however too lightly continued, since it certainly conveys a false idea. Pictures of fancy are not called portrait-painting, and no body who distinguishes
terms will allow the title of biographer, which can only mean a writer of real lives, such as Plutarch, Nepos, &c. to be well applied to the authors of Tom Jones, Roderick Random, David Simple, &c.2 who may be more justly styled comic-romance-writers. This piece of verbal criticism is the less insignificant, as it is owing to the mistake of a writer of great wit and humour, who likewise calls this a life-writing age, which may be true too, and yet not applicable to it, on most of the examples he quotes for the grounds of this epithet.3
