nd misplaced when they
pass from lip to lip. Most of the 'good sayings' of history are
invention, and most of them have been attributed to different persons.
A history which is plainly written under the influence of party bias
has the value of an advocate's speech giving one side of the question.
When our only materials for the knowledge of a period are derived from
such histories, the saying of Voltaire should be remembered--that we
can confidently believe only the evil which a party writer tells of
his own side and the good which he recognises in his opponents. In
judging the historian we must consider his nearness to the events he
relates, his probable means of information and the internal evidence
in his narrative of accuracy, honesty, and judgment, and we must also
consider the standard of proof and the methods of historical writing
prevailing in his time. A modern writer who placed in the mouths of
his personages speeches which he himself invented would be justly
discredited, but in antiquity it was a recognised custom for a
historian to embody in fictitious speeches the reflections suggested
by his narrative and the motives which he believed to have actuated
his heroes.

Different ages differ enormously in the severity of proof which they
exact, in the degree of accuracy which they attain. The credibility of
a statement also depends not only on the amount of its evidence, but
also on its own inherent probability. Everyone will feel that an
amount of testimony that would be quite sufficient to persuade him
that a butcher's boy had been seen driving along a highway is wholly
different from that which would be required to persuade him that a
ghost had been met there. The same rule applies to the history of the
past, and it is complicated by the great difference in different ages
of the measure of probability, or, in other words, by the strong
predisposition in certain stages of knowledge to accept statements or
explanations of facts which in later stages we know to be incredible
or in a high degree improbable. Few subjects in history are more
difficult than the laws of evidence in dealing with the supernatural
and the extent to which the authority of historians in relating
credible and probable facts is invalidated by the presence of a
mythical element in their narratives.

Connected with this subject is also the question how far it is
possible by merely internal evidence to decompose an ancient document,
resolvi