as to exact truth, and such
poor observers, for the most part, of what goes on under their eyes.
The ballad which was hawked about the streets at the execution of
Captain Kidd, and which was still to be bought at street-stalls within
a few years, affirms three times in a single stanza that the pirate's
name was Robert. Yet he was commissioned, indicted, convicted, and
hanged as William Kidd. Nor was he, as is generally supposed, convicted
of piracy, but of murder. The marvels of Spiritualism are supernatural
to the average observer, who is willing to pay for that dulness from
another world which he might have for nothing in this, while they seem
mere legerdemain, and not of the highest quality, to the trained organs
of scientific men.

History, we are told, is philosophy teaching by example. But how if the
example does not apply? Le Verrier discovers Neptune when, according to
his own calculations, the planet should not have been in the place
where his telescope found it. Does the example redound to the credit of
luck or of mathematics? The historian may give a thoroughly false view
of an event by simply assuming that _after_ means _in consequence of_,
or even by the felicitous turn of a sentence. Style will find readers
and shape convictions, while mere truth only gathers dust on the shelf.
The memory first, and by degrees the judgment, is enslaved by the
epigrams of Tacitus or Michelet. Our conception of scenes and men is
outlined and colored for us by the pictorial imagination of Carlyle.
Indeed, after reading history, one can only turn round, with Montaigne,
and say, _What know I?_ There was a time when the reputation of Judas
might have been thought past mending, but a German has whitewashed him
as thoroughly as Malone did Shakespeare's bust, and an English poet
made him the hero of a tragedy, as the one among the disciples who
believed too much. Call no one happy till he is dead? Rather call no
one safe, whether in good repute or evil, after he has been dead long
enough to have his effigy done in historical wax-work. Only get the
real clothes, that is, only be careful to envelop him in a sufficiently
probable dressing of facts, and the public will be entirely satisfied.
What's Hecuba to us, or we to Hecuba? Or is Thackeray's way any nearer
the truth, who strips Louis the Great of all his stage-properties, and
shows him to us the miserable forked radish of decrepitude?

There are many ways of writing what is call