632 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tive genius, such as the old Arabian Nights or the modern Shav- 

 ing of Shagpat. It is not strictly needful for my present purpose 

 that I should say anything about narratives which are professedly 

 fictitious. Yet it may be well, perhaps, if I disclaim any intention 

 of derogating from their value, when I insist upon the paramount 

 necessity of recollecting that there is no sort of relation between 

 the ethical, or the aesthetic, or even the scientific importance of 

 such works, and their worth as historical documents. Unques- 

 tionably, to the poetic artist, or even to the student of psychology, 

 Hamlet and Macbeth may be better instructors than all the books 

 of a wilderness of professors of aesthetics or moral philosophy. 

 But, as evidence of occurrences in Denmark, or in Scotland, at 

 the times and places indicated, they are out of court ; the pro- 

 foundest admiration for them, the deepest gratitude for their 

 influence, are consistent with the knowledge that, historically 

 speaking, they are worthless fables, in which any foundation 

 of reality that may exist is submerged beneath the imaginative 

 superstructure. 



At present, however, I am not concerned to dwell upon the im- 

 portance of fictitious literature and the immensity of the work 

 which it has effected in the education of the human race. I pro- 

 pose to deal with the much more limited inquiry, Are there two 

 other classes of consecutive narratives (as distinct from state- 

 ments of individual facts), or only one ? Is there any known his- 

 torical work which is throughout exactly true, or is there not ? 

 In the case of the great majority of histories the answer is not 

 doubtful : they are all only partially true. Even those venerable 

 works which bear the names of some of the greatest of ancient 

 Greek and Roman writers, and which have been accepted by gen- 

 eration after generation, down to modern times, as stores of un- 

 questionable truth, have been compelled by scientific criticism, 

 after a long battle, to descend to the common level, and to confess 

 to a large admixture of error. I might fairly take this for grant- 

 ed ; but it may be well that I should intrench myself behind the 

 very apposite words of a historical authority who is certainly not 

 obnoxious to even a suspicion of skeptical tendencies : 



Time was — and that not very long ago — when all the relations of ancient au- 

 thors concerning the old world were received with a ready belief; and an unrea- 

 soning and uncritical faith accepted with equal satisfaction the narrative of the 

 campaigns of Caesar and of the doings of Romulus, the account of Alexander's 

 marches and of the conquests of Semiramis. We can most of us remember when, 

 in this country, the whole story of regal Rome, and even the legend of the Trojan 

 settlement in Latium, were seriously placed before boys as history and discoursed 

 of as unhesitatingly and in as dogmatic a tone as the tale of the Catiline conspiracy 

 or the conquest of Britain. . . . 



But all this is now changed. The last century has seen the birth and growth 



