ion of gossip in the lives of
individuals, the disposition of human nature to relish discrediting
rumour is pitifully conspicuous. We know _Hamlet's_ opinion on the
matter:

Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.

And again:

Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,
Thou shalt not escape calumny.

This, it is to be feared, is merely the sad truth, for mankind, while it
admires both greatness and goodness, would seem to resent the one and
only half believe in the other. At all events, nothing is more to its
taste than the rumour that detracts from the great or sullies the good;
and so long as the rumour be entertaining, it has little concern for its
truth.

Froude, in writing of Caesar, has this to say admirably to our purpose:

In ages which we call heroic, the saint works miracles, the warrior
performs exploits beyond the strength of natural man. In ages less
visionary, which are given to ease and enjoyment, the tendency is to
bring a great man down to the common level, and to discover or
invent faults which shall show that he is or was but a little man
after all. Our vanity is soothed by evidence that those who have
eclipsed us in the race of life are no better than ourselves, or in
some respects worse than ourselves; and if to these general impulses
be added political or personal animosity, accusations of depravity
are circulated as surely about such men, and are credited as readily
as under other influences are the marvellous achievements of a Cid
or a St. Francis.

The absurdity of a calumny may be as evident as the absurdity of a
miracle; the ground for belief may be no more than a lightness of
mind, and a less pardonable wish that it may be true. But the idle
tale floats in society, and by and by is written down in books and
passes into the region of established realities.

The proportion of such idle tales seriously printed as history can
never, of course, be computed. Sometimes one is tempted to think that
history is mainly "whole cloth." Certainly the lives of such men as
Caesar are largely made up of what one might term illustrative fictions
rather than actual facts. The story of Caesar and Cleopatra is probably
such an "illustrative fiction," representing something that might very
well have happened to Caesar, whether it did so or not. At all event