"The stores of history are accessible to every one, and are no more exhausted or impoverished by the hints thus borrowed from them than the fountain is drained by the water which we subtract for domestic purposes. And in reply to the sober charge of falsehood against a narrative announced positively to be fictitious, one can only answer by Prior's exclamation - 'Odzooks, must one swear to the truth of a song?'"
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"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its sho…"
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