Truth and her Companions

Richard Garnett (1835-1906) was an English librarian, biographer, writer and poet. His literary works include numerous translations from Greek, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; several books of verse; the book of short stories The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales (1888, 16 stories; 12 stories added in the 1903 edition); biographies of Thomas Carlyle, John Milton, William Blake, and others; The Age of Dryden (1895); Essays of an Ex-Librarian (1901); a History of Italian Literature; English Literature: An Illustrated Record (with Edmund Gosse); and many articles for encyclopaedias, including the ninth and tenth editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and the Dictionary of National Biography.

From Garnett's collection The Twilight of the Gods we have select for our readers Truth and her Companions, a satirical dialogue in which the writer offers a sharp critique of human nature and society through the personification of Truth.

The dialogue is written in a Lucianic style—a form of satire popularized by the ancient Greek writer Lucian of Samosata, where gods and personified virtues discuss human folly with a mix of levity and profound skepticism. Garnett uses elegant, formal English to contrast the "divine" perspective with the messy, often violent reality of human behavior.