form of an epic or romance. Accordingly he takes
liberties with his authorities, deviating from them now and then, and
even once or twice introducing incidents not reconcilable with either
of them, if not irreconcilable also with historical and geographical
possibility. Hence one may doubt sometimes whether what one is reading
is to be regarded as history or as invention. On this point I can but
repeat words I have already used: as it is, we are bound to be
thankful. In quest of a literary theme, De Quincey was arrested
somehow by that extraordinary transmigration of a Kalmuck horde across
the face of Asia in 1771, which had also struck Gibbon; he inserted
his hands into the vague chaos of Asiatic inconceivability enshrouding
the transaction; and he tore out the connected and tolerably
conceivable story which we now read. There is no such vivid version of
any such historical episode in all Gibbon, and possibly nothing truer
essentially, after all, to the substance of the facts as they actually
happened."

Professor Masson's Appended Editorial Note on the Chinese Accounts of
the Migration (Vol. VII, pp. 422-6):

"As has been mentioned in the Preface, these appeared, in translated
form, in 1776, in Vol. I of the great collection of _Memoires
concernant les Chinois_, published at Paris by the enterprise of the
French Jesuit missionaries at Pekin. The most important of them, under
the title _Monument de la Transmigration des Tourgouths des Bords de
la Mer Caspienne dans l'Empire de la Chine_, occupies twenty-seven
pages of the volume, and purports to be a translation of a Chinese
document drawn up by the Emperor Kien Long himself. This Emperor,
described by the missionaries as 'the best-lettered man in his
Empire,' had special reasons for so commemorating, as one of the most
interesting events of his reign, the sudden self-transference in 1771
of so large a Tartar horde from the Russian allegiance to his own.
Much of the previous part of his reign had been spent in that work of
conquering and consolidating the Tartar appendages of his Empire which
had been begun by his celebrated grandfather, the Emperor Kang Hi
(1661-1721); and it so chanced that the particular Tartar horde which
now, in 1771, had marched all the way from the shores of the Caspian
to appeal to him for protection and for annexation to the Chinese
Empire were but the posterity of a horde who had formerly belonged to
that Empire, but had detached themselves