Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays"

Excerpt

‘Truth is stranger than fiction.’  A trite remark.  We all say it again and again:  but how few of us believe it!  How few of us, when we read the history of heroical times and heroical men, take the story simply as it stands!  On the contrary, we try to explain it away; to prove it all not to have been so very wonderful; to impute accident, circumstance, mean and commonplace motives; to lower every story down to the level of our own littleness, or what we (unjustly to ourselves and to the God who is near us all) choose to consider our level; to rationalise away all the wonders, till we make them at last impossible, and give up caring to believe them; and prove to our own melancholy satisfaction that Alexander conquered the world with a pin, in his sleep, by accident.