PREFACE. Vll 



generally the case, an effort is made to form a smooth and 

 flowing narrative, in elegant modern phraseology, the objects 

 and events all suffer a kind of translation or paraphrase, which 

 greatly alters their character, and in many instances is attended 

 with the effect of both suppressing the true and creating the 

 false. No one who has not compared the elegant narratives 

 of the last and present age with the simple and homely chroni- 

 cles from which they have mostly been compiled, could form 

 any adequate idea of the perversion which history [natural 

 as well as political] is thus made to suffer. Sometimes a bare 

 and rigid fact is amplified and clothed; sometimes new facts 

 are imagined and added, in order that the only one for which 

 there is authority may tell a little better. There is a great 

 deal of rounding off and polishing down to make all fair, 

 straight, and fluent. Carelessness also has its effect in bring- 

 ing about alterations. Even in the change from the homely 

 expressions of an early age to those suitable to the modern 

 writer, the real character of the events is sometimes falsified." 



That this should not be the case in the present volume, I 

 have attentively considered every statement, collated one author 

 with another, and often gone over the ground afresh, and 

 traced errors to their sources ; and in many instances it will 

 be found that I have exposed this objectionable system of sup- 

 pressing one side of the question, and of perverting and gar- 

 nishing the real facts. Theories are not to be despised, but 

 they are ever to be suspected. There is as much of truth as 

 of pleasantry in Cowper's observation, that " one generation 

 blows bubbles and the next breaks them; but in the mean 

 time your philosopher is a happy man. He escapes a thousand 

 inquietudes to which the indolent are subject, and finds his 

 occupation, whether it be the pursuit of a butterfly or a 

 demonstration, the wholesomest exercise in the world; and 

 should his discoveries eventually prove to be only dreams, 

 they are to him realities while he proceeds." 



The study of nature and that of the muses are so akin to 



