e here admire in
Prince Charles; it is a piety, a loyalty, a goodness like Gordon's that
we revere in old Lord Pitsligo in another story.

Many of the tales are concerned with fighting, for that is the most
dramatic part of mortal business. These English captives who retake a
ship from the Turks, these heroes of the _Shannon_ and the _Chesapeake_,
were doubtless good men and true in all their lives, but the light of
history only falls on them in war. The immortal Three Hundred of
Thermopylae would also have been unknown, had they not died, to a man,
for the sake of the honour of Lacedaemon. The editor conceives that it
would have been easy to give more 'local colour' to the sketch of
Thermopylae: to have dealt in description of the Immortals, drawn from
the friezes in Susa, lately discovered by French enterprise. But the
story is Greek, and the Greeks did not tell their stories in that way,
but with a simplicity almost bald. Yet who dare alter and 'improve' the
narrative of Herodotus? In another most romantic event, the finding of
Vineland the Good, by Leif the Lucky, our materials are vague with the
vagueness of a dream. Later fancy has meddled with the truth of the
saga. English readers, no doubt, best catch the charm of the adventure
in Mr. Rudyard Kipling's astonishingly imaginative tale called 'The Best
Story in the World.' For the account of Isandhlwana, and Rorke's Drift,
'an ower-true tale,' the editor has to thank his friend Mr. Rider
Haggard, who was in South Africa at the time of the disaster, and who
has generously given time and labour to the task of ascertaining, as far
as it can be ascertained, the exact truth of the melancholy, but,
finally, not inglorious, business. The legend of 'Two Great Cricket
Matches' is taken, in part, from Lillywhite's scores, and Mr. Robert
Lyttelton's spirited pages in the 'Badminton' book of Cricket. The
second match the editor writes of 'as he who saw it,' to quote Caxton on
Dares Phrygius. These legends prove that a match is never lost till it
is won.

Some of the True Stories contain, we may surmise, traces of the
imaginative faculty. The escapes of Benvenuto Cellini, of Trenck, and of
Casanova must be taken as the heroes chose to report them; Benvenuto and
Casanova have no firm reputation for veracity. Again, the escape of
Caesar Borgia is from a version handed down by the great Alexandre
Dumas, and we may surmise that Alexandre allowed it to lose nothing in
the telling