here I may say that we believe Thucydides because he was a contemporary of the events which he relates; he was himself an actor in some of them: he had access to authentic information, both oral and monumental, and we have no reason to distrust his veracity. Of course I do not include the long speeches he puts into the mouth of the characters he introduces, for they are obviously manufactured, or, at all events, dressed up for the occasion, according to a practice very common in antiquity. We disbelieve a great part of the narrative of Livy for the following reasons. We know that he could have no trustworthy authority for many of his statements respecting the early history of Rome: some of those statements are intrinsically improbable, if not incredible he lived centuries later than many of the events which he records, and he had not the critical faculty which enables an historian of the past, by a kind of instinct, to separate the true from the false. To this I must add the essentially Roman prejudice in favour of everything that would tell in favour of the greatness and glory of Rome. Hence his unfair account of the early wars of the Republic, and the injustice with which he has treated Hannibal.

We believe the story of the Anabasis and Retreat of the Ten Thousand, because the historian was the general who commanded the Greeks in that famous expedition; but we reject his fables about dreams, omens, and prophesies, because we know that he was credulous about such things, and they were not matters which came within the scope of his own personal observation.

Our own early historians were as careless as their readers were credulous. King Lear, the son of Bladud, was accepted as an historical personage; and even Milton, in his History of England, admits the fable "of Brutus and his line with the whole progeny of kings to Julius Cæsar," although it is impossible not to see that he has little faith in it. But he says, "certain or uncertain, be that upon the credit of those whom I must follow; so far as keeps aloof from impossible and absurd, attested by ancient writers from books more

ancient, I refuse not as the due and proper subject of story.” Now, why do we refuse to believe the narrative? Simply because, although it may contain nothing "impossible or absurd," which is Milton's sole rule of exception, we know that the authors could not possibly have had any authentic information about the facts which they record. A child is as competent to write history as a grown-up man, if the statements of preceding authors are the sources of their authority and the means they had of ascertaining the truth.

Dates are often of the utmost importance in verifying historical facts, but the dates themselves are sometimes uncertain. In Grecian history the general custom was to reckon by the year of the Olympiad, and therefore it is essential to know the date of the first year of the first Olympiad. Now, how do we ascertain this? If you look into Clinton's, Fasti Hellenici, p. 150, you will see that it is taken to correspond with 776 B.C., and this is proved by a curious consensus of authorities. The games were celebrated at intervals of four years, and if we know independently the exact date of an event, and find it placed in the particular year of a particular Olympiad, we can, by reckoning backwards, ascertain accurately the date of the first. For instance, we know, from contemporary or other evidence, that the consulships of C. Pompeius Gallus and Q. Verannius, at Rome, coincided with the first year of the 207th Olympiad, and we know the year of the Christian era of those consulships this was the year A.D. 49. Now 206 Olympiads or 824 years had elapsed since the beginning of the first, and this gives the year B.C. 776 as its date.

It is no doubt difficult to invent wholly so-called historical facts, which, if closely compared with known contemporaneous occurrences and ascertained dates, may not be shown to be false. But it is often still more difficult to find the material for such criticism. Oblivion may have swallowed up the records of the past, and then the only tests we can apply are the inherent probability or improbability of the alleged facts, their consistency or inconsistency with them

selves, and our knowledge of the means which the writer possessed of being acquainted with their truth. I have already pointed out the untrustworthiness of historical statements first made by authors who lived long after the events which they record. And I have also shown that it is by no means altogether safe to guage the credibility of a fact by its agreement or disagreement with probability; but as regards the test supplied by the means of comparing historical allegations with other historical facts which have been sufficiently proved, some of the most brilliant triumphs of criticism have been won by applying it. My time is too limited to allow me to adduce more than one or two specimens of this, and I think I cannot do better than cite that splendid example of scholarship and criticism, Bentley's Dissertation on the Genuineness of the Epistles of Phalaris. The history of its authorship is this. About the year 1690, Sir William Temple published an essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning, in which he maintained the superiority of the ancients. And in support of his position, "that the oldest books we have are still in their kind the best," he adduced the "Fables of Æsop" and the and the "Epistles of Phalaris." This attracted attention to the epistles, and a new edition of them was given to the world by the Hon. Charles Boyle; and then Bentley published his Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, the object being to prove that they were spurious. I may mention, in passing, that an amusing parody of the original controversy between the respective champions of ancient and modern learning was written by Swift, called "The Battle of the Books." It may be interesting to point out some of the proofs by which Bentley for ever destroyed the credit which had been given to these epistles

(1.) He shows that in them Phalaris speaks of borrowing money from the inhabitants of a town in Sicily nearly three centuries before that town was built.

(2.) Phalaris is represented as giving to the physician a present of cups, called by the name of a Corinthian potter who lived more than a hundred years after Phalaris' death.

(3.) Phalaris speaks of Zancle and Messene as distinct towns, whereas, in truth, Zancle was merely the ancient name of Messene.

(4.) In one of his letters, Phalaris addresses Pythagoras as a philosopher, and speaks of his system of philosophy, whereas we know that Pythagoras first called himself a philosopher, or lover of wisdom, when Leon of Sicyon asked him what he was. And it is impossible to believe that the term was in vogue, or even known to Phalaris, who, when he wrote the letter, had never seen Pythagoras.

(5.) Phalaris is very angry with Aristolochus for writing tragedies against him at a time when the word tragedy was utterly unknown.

(6.) Phalaris writes in Attic Greek, whereas, as a Sicilian, his dialect would have been Doric.

Let me illustrate this kind of criticism by a different example. On the Monte Cavallo—the old Quirinal Hill, at Rome-stand two colossal statues of horses, called "I Colossi di Monte Cavallo." Under one pedestal are, or were, inscribed the words Opus Phidia, Opus Praxitelis. But formerly there were two more elaborate inscriptions, one to the effect that Phidias had here sculptured Bucephalus, the horse of Alexander the Great; and the other that Praxiteles, in competition with Phidias, had sculptured another figure of the same horse, Bucephalus. Now Phidias died somewhere about 439 B.C. Praxiteles flourished in 364 B.C., nearly a century later, and Alexander the Great was not born until 356 B.C. This was too much for even the credulity of a bygone generation, and Pope Urban VIII. effaced the inscriptions, and substituted for them the simple words Opus Phidia and Opus Praxitelis, which had at all events the merit of not being guilty of a palpable anachronism, although each is most probably absolutely untrue. But such an anachronism is not quite so bad as that of the writer in a feuilleton of the Constitutionel (supposed to have been Lamaratine), who says, "The tombs of great poets inspire great passions. It was at Tasso's tomb that Petrarch nourished his respectful remembrance of Laura !" Now, Petrarch died in 1374, and Tasso published his Gerusalemme Liberata in 1581!

This is very different from any argument against the genuineness of a fact founded merely on discrepancies of statement. A curious instance of this occurs in the accounts given of the execution of the Earl of Argyle in 1661. Clarendon says that he was condemned to be hanged, and executed. Burnet and Echard say that he was beheaded. This has been made use of by Paley, in his Evidences of the Christian Religion, with reference to the variance in the statements of the Evangelists as to the circumstances of the Crucifixion. No one doubts that Argyle was executed, which is the important fact; and there would be still less reason to doubt the fact of the Crucifixion, however the Evangelists may differ in minute details. It is, of course, a difficulty in the way of those who assert the literal and verbal inspiration of the Scriptures, but that is a subject foreign to my purpose, and too large to be dealt with by a passing notice in such an address as this.

It is a strange paradox that the belief of some writers and many readers seems to increase in the inverse ratio of the probabilities of the case. How else can we account for the fact that the more history recedes into the darkness of the past, bold statements are received with unquestioning credulity. Thus Dr. Hales, in his work on chronology, assures us that the thirty reigns of the Athenian kings and archons from Cecrops to Creon, from "one of the most authentic and correct documents to be found in the whole range of profane chronology," the truth being that the reigns of the kings. are little better than fabulous; and Bunsen, in his Egypt's Place in Universal History, undertakes to reconstruct the authentic chronology of Egypt for a period of nearly 4,000 years before Christ, and to "restore to the ancient history of the world the vital energy of which it has been so long deprived," although his chief authorities, independently of some monumental inscriptions, are Eratosthenes and Manetho, writers who lived more than 3,000 years after the period which they are supposed to authenticate. Mow Manetho composed his history from two sources, temple registers and