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174 ." "O venerable daughter of Mnemosyne, I doubt every single statement you ever made since your ladyship was a Muse! For all your grave airs and high pretensions, you are not a whit more trustworthy than some of your lighter sisters on whom your partisans look down. You bid me listen to a general's oration to his soldiers. Nonsense! He no more made it than Turpin made his dying speech at Newgate. You pronounce a panegyric of a hero; I doubt it, ans say you flatter outrageously. You utter the condemnation of a loose character; I doubt it, and think you are prejudiced and take the side of the Dons. You offer me an autobiography; I doubt all autobiographies I ever read, except those, perhaps, of Mr. Robinson Crusoe, Mariner, and writers of his class."

Cold comfort, my masters, for aspiring historians, whether nearing the arctic ideal of the "Able Editor" or the antarctic real of the "Popular Lecturer"—wide as the poles asunder, alike icebound, innavigable by common seamanship. The model historian is a being of whose faultless proportions Thucydides is but a fractional type, Herodotus but a first rude daub, Livy but a prolix hint, Tacitus but an abrupt reminder. The actual historian is a pretentious driveller, who, in historicising, ipso facto takes out a license to tell lies; black lies by the gross, and white lies carte blanche; who is to be coughed down as an impostor, and accousted a reckless importer of fictions, albeit he write of Florence and subscribe himself Machiavelli, or follow the madcap Charles of Sweden as Voltaire, or be shelved among "standard" authors under the names of Sismondi, Guizot, Mueller, Niebuhr, Hallam, Grote, Macaulay, Bancroft,—or among "classics," of high-and-dry, highest-and-driest eminence, as Robertson and his respectable congeners. The doctrine, one may say, teaches immaculate conception; the fact, absolute depravity. The precept requires a nature not a little lower than the angels, but their fellow, their peer, their equal; the performance argues a creatureship oscillating between knave and fool, quack and dolt, charlatan and clown.

Meanwhile, and in the set teeth of this fierce antithesis of ideal and real, of à priori sublimity and à posteriori degradation, we count ourselves happy to be old-fashioned enough, and credulous enough, to retain a quantum of faith in the world's canonised histories, and of simple gratitude towards the world's favourite historians. Notwithstanding the brilliant Frenchman's mot, that all history is founded on a general conspiracy against truth, we somehow shirk the idea of a man like Mr. Prescott being among the conspirators. And on the whole we find ourselves accepting without much demur, without much jealous misgiving or infidel distrust, the elaborate and erudite stories he gives us, of the lives and deaths of Ferdinand and Isabella, of the doughty emprise of Cortes and his braves, and the bloody progress of Pizarro in Peru. Mr. Prescott is, to use a Coleridgean epithet, a highly "reliable" historian, at least with those who have not wholly lost the faculty of reliance. He is confessedly eminent in research, and careful in the collation, and the "eclectic review" of his materials. His has been in no faint degree the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties—similar, though happily in a milder form, to that of Augustin Thierry, whose loss of sight is a calamity aggravated by other ills that, in his case, flesh is heir to, and spirit so bravely battles against. Mr. Prescott has not allowed defective vision to excuse him from minute scrutiny of the multifarious stores to be