XLII. I should be sorry if what I have just now said, should induce in my readers, a disesteem for two such respectable writers, as Paulus Emilius, and father Nicholas Causinus. I know the great merit of both the one and the other of them, and I venerate more in the second, the candour of his mind, and the integrity of his heart, than his great wisdom and learning. He, in a particular instance of his life, gave a striking proof of his virtue; which was, that, in order to guide in a right train the conscience of a monarch, who, by making him his confessor, had confided to him the direction of his religious conduct, he had voluntarily exposed himself to, and felt the effects of the resentment of a furious and vindictive minister, who governed every thing. But the greatest men, sometimes give tokens of their being no more than men; and I have purposely noted these defects in two authors, so celebrated as Paulus Emilius and father Causinus; in order to shew, how strong the temptation is in a writer, to ornament his history with something of his own invention, if authors of the especial credit of those I have just mentioned, are now and then liable to fall into this mistake. XLIII. Our eloquent countryman, the illustrious Guevara, has been very much taken notice of for having used this licence, not only by foreign authors, but those of our own nation also; which freedom he has exercised to such a degree, that Nicholas Antonio says, he took the liberty of ascribing to antient authors his own fictions, and sported and made as free with all history, as a man would do with the fables of Esop, or the fictitious tales of Lucian. His life of Marcus Aurelius, with respect to the veracity of it, is not held in better estimation among the critics, than the Cyrus of Xenophon. It certainly cannot be denied, that he did not scruple to introduce circumstances of fancy and imagination into his writings, when he thought they would contribute strikingly to the entertainment of the reader: such for example (in order to point out the cause or origin of the extraordinary cruelty of Caligula) as that of attributing it to the conduct or disposition of the nurse that suckled him, who was a masculine fierce woman, and had for some slight offence killed another woman, whose blood she bathed her nipples with; and, while they were wet with it, applied the lips of the infant Caligula to them. He quotes Dion Cassius as his author for this tale, although in Dion Cassius there is no such relation to be found. SECT. XIV.