"the legends of civilised society." Like legends they
have their origin in confused recollections, allusions, mistaken
interpretations, imaginings of all kinds which fasten upon particular
persons and events.

Legends and anecdotes are at bottom mere popular beliefs, arbitrarily
attached to historical personages; they belong to folk-lore, not to
history.[161] We must therefore guard against the temptation to treat
legend as an alloy of accurate facts and errors out of which it is
possible by analysis to extract grains of historical truth. A legend is
a conglomerate in which there may be some grains of truth, and which may
even be capable of being analysed into its elements; but there is no
means of distinguishing the elements taken from reality from those which
are the work of imagination. To use Niebuhr's expression, a legend is "a
mirage produced by an invisible object according to an unknown law of
refraction."

The crudest analytical procedure consists in rejecting those details in
the legendary narrative which appear impossible, miraculous,
contradictory, or absurd, and retaining the rational residue as
historical. This is how the Protestant rationalists of the eighteenth
century treated biblical narratives. One might as well amputate the
marvellous part of a fairy tale, suppress Puss in Boots, and keep the
Marquis of Carabas as an historical character. A more refined but no
less dangerous method is to compare different legends in order to deduce
their common historical basis. Grote[162] has shown, with reference to
Greek tradition, that it is impossible to extract any trustworthy
information from legend by any process whatever.[163] We must make up
our minds to treat legend as a product of imagination; we may look in it
for a people's conceptions, not for the external facts in that people's
history. The rule will be to reject every statement of legendary origin;
nor does this apply only to narratives in legendary form: a narrative
which has an historical appearance, but is founded on the data of
legend, the opening chapters of Thucydides for example, ought equally to
be discarded.

In the case of written transmission it remains to inquire whether the
author reproduced his source without altering it. This inquiry forms
part of the critical investigation of the sources,[164] so far as it can
be pursued by a comparison of texts. But when the source has disappeared
we are reduced to internal criticism. We ask, firs