Sethos: History or Life Taken from the Private Monuments of Ancient Egypt

P R E F A C E.

greater luster to the character of the lead
figure. He accompanies
his depictions with delivered judgments, &
formal opinions. In a word, he makes
the instruction complete both through lessons
& through examples. One would have to unite
or melt together several great
men of History & gather
the events of many cen-
turies; before encountering therein the sub-
jects of admiration & imitation, that a
good Author of fiction makes one find
within an often quite small part
of the life of a single Hero.

    The two Works that have appeared
until now among us in this genre,
Telemachus François Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus (1699), a famous didactic novel used to educate the grandson of Louis XIV. & The Travels of Cy-
rus Andrew Michael Ramsay’s The Travels of Cyrus (1727), a philosophical novel written in imitation of Fénelon., have perfectly fulfilled this
idea. It is not the comparison
with History, which is of an entirely
different order, it is the comparison of
good Works of fiction, which will contri-
bute more and more to making one feel the
pernicious futility of Romances The author uses "Romans" (Romances/Novels) here in a pejorative sense to describe frivolous or unrealistic fiction, contrasting it with "good" moral works.; when-
ever one understands by this term a depic-