Our postmodernist contemporaries give too little credit to the wisdom of the past. Before Hayden White, Fielding knew that historians were the real romance-writers, that Cervantes, not Mariana, had written the true history of his countrymen — and indeed not of his countrymen only, but of "the World in general".¹ And Richard Rorty's notion that truth is indistinguishable from fiction is no more radical than that of the pious biographer Agnellus, who a thousand years ago, when he could find no facts about his subjects, wrote resolutely on, explaining — in words I took for a motto to the biography of Fielding: "I invented lives for them, and I do not believe them to be false."²