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Was Anne Boleyn guilty of the eharges brought against her 
by Henry VIII. ? Mr. Fronde has laboured to prove that she 
was, but his arguments are very far from convincing. 
What was the real cause why James I. spared the life of 
the Earl of Southampton, after his conviction of the murder of 
Sir Thomas Overbury ? 
Who was the man in the Iron Mask ? Who wrote the 
letters of Junius? 
It is extraordinary how few of the anecdotes which pass 
current in literature will bear the test of critical inquiry, and 
the result of a careful investigation of the evidence is apt to 
dispose the mind to general scepticism on such subjects. Let 
me mention a few instances which will serve to enliven what 
otherwise, I fear, has been rather a dull discourse. 
The first I shall mention is not an anecdote, but a so-called 
historical fact. 
We find it stated in Lempriere^s Classical Dictionary that 
the army which Xerxes led into Greece consisted of upwards of 
five million souls, and he says that “ the multitude which the 
fidelity of historians has not exaggerated was stopped at Ther- 
mopylae by 300 Spartans under King Leonidas.” The thing is 
simply impossible, and therefore incredible, unless we adopt the 
maxim of Tertullian, and say, Credo quia impossibile est. 
The story of Canute commanding the waves to advance 
no farther first appears in Henry of Huntingdon, who wrote 
a century after the Danish king. The legend of Fair Rosa- 
mond is treated by Hume as fabulous ; and the greatest suspi- 
cion rests on the account of St. Pierre and his companions 
delivering up the keys of Calais to Edward III., with halters 
round their necks, and having their lives spared at the inter- 
cession of the Queen. The popular story of the origin of the 
Order of the Garter, as owing to the accident that happened 
to the Countess of Salisbury when dancing at the court of 
Edward III., is first mentioned by Polydore Virgil, who wrote 
200 years later. In his Lives of the Judges, Mr. Foss has 
shown that the story of the re-appointment of Sir William 
Gascoigne as Chief Justice, by Henry V., who, when Prince of 
Wales, had been committed by him to prison for an assault, is 
the reverse of true, for it seems that Henry V. actually deprived 
him of the office of Chief Justice a few days after his accession 
to the throne. The interesting story that Cromwell, Hampden, 
and Hazelrig had actually embarked for New England in 1638, 
prepared to abandon the country for ever, when they were 
stopped by an Order in Council, has been proved to have no 
foundation in fact. 
The celebrated phrase attributed to Francis I. after the 
