" Or, to go no further back than
the last number of the _Nineteenth Century_, surely that excellent
lady, Miss Strickland, is not to be refused all credence, because of
the myth about the second James's remains which she seems to have
unconsciously invented.
Of course this is perfectly true. I am afraid there is no man alive
whose witness could be accepted, if the condition precedent were proof
that he had never invented and promulgated a myth. In the minds of all
of us there are little places here and there, like the indistinguishable
spots on a rock which give foothold to moss or stonecrop; on which, if
the germ of a myth fall, it is certain to grow, without in the least
degree affecting our accuracy or truthfulness elsewhere. Sir Walter
Scott knew that he could not repeat a story without, as he said,
"giving it a new hat and stick." Most of us differ from Sir Walter
only in not knowing about this tendency of the mythopoeic faculty to
break out unnoticed. But it is also perfectly true that the mythopoeic
faculty is not equally active in all minds, nor in all regions and
under all conditions of the same mind. David Hume was certainly not so
liable to temptation as the Venerable Bede, or even as some recent
historians who could be mentioned; and the most imaginative of
debtors, if he owes five pounds, never makes an obligation to pay a
hundred out of it.
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