Herodotus, if we may believe Blakesley and Professor Sayce, though the “Father of History,” by no means illustrates tradition at its best. Different, however, would it be, could we make up our minds, backed by the later authority of Canon Rawlinson to side in this perennial contest with Henri Estienne. This scholar in preparing an edition of that ancient traveller took occasion to maintain that his author was the reporter of things fabulous to an extent far less than was generally supposed. Hearing that of this defence, which was written in Latin, it was proposed to make a translation into French, he determined, as an old critic says, to become now a _traditore_, as he had formerly early been a _traduttore_, and to render his own work. But if this was his original purpose, he immediately lost sight of it. He took up, in fact, his argument thus:—From the unlikelihood of an event it is unreasonable to conclude against it: Herodotus may have reported things true, in presenting unlikely tales, otherwise, we must banish a prodigious amount of incontestable but absurd matter, though much of this character has occurred of late, especially in popery, as I proceed to instance in anecdotes which objectors may style apocryphal, fables they will call malicious, and chronicles they are certain to brand as scandalous. Now, this was clearly of intolerable bearing. And according to Tollius, its upshot was that Estienne was burnt in effigy at Paris; though, having fled to the mountains of Auvergne, and being in the thick of winter, he was enabled to chuckle at his joke that he never was so cold as when he was being burnt, a joke the authenticity of which late commentators might perhaps have less readily impeached had they remembered that Antonio de Dominis had used it, as he too for writing an unappreciated book was consumed in effigy at Rome, while he lay shivering with the cold of a November at sea and a fugitive’s fears at heart. Certain it is that at Geneva Estienne met with repulse. For the archives of that state show that late in 1566, on his first applying for a license to expose for sale his “Apologie pour Herodote,” he was directed to amend “certains feulletz où il y a des propos vilains et parlans trop évidemment des princes en mal” and that after these amendments were duly made he deliberately encouraged the suppression of his work, by taking advantage of an imperfect piratical edition, appearing at Lyons, to add without license the famous “Avertissement” with its tables or indexes, which drew down upon him imprisonment, followed quickly by enlargement coupled with conspicuous deprivation of the Eucharist on one occasion—if that be the meaning of “pour punition, privé de la cène, pour une fois.”