V. But what happened to Quintus Curtius is more extraordinary than any thing we have hitherto mentioned. This author’s history of Alexander made its first appearance about three centuries ago; the manuscript having been found in the library of Saint Victor. It is not yet known with any certainty who Quintus Curtius was, nor in what time he lived. Some believe he was contemporary with Augustus, others with Claudius, others with Vespasian, and others with Trajan; according as his stile appears to them to approach nearer to, or differ more from, the antient purity of the Latin idiom; and there are not wanting those, who think that such a man as Quintus Curtius never existed, and that this was a fictitious name, under which some modern author had concealed himself, in hopes that his history would be better received by annexing to it a name resembling that of an antient writer; and some again have attributed this work to Petrarch. One of the strongest foundations on which they build this conjecture, is, that you cannot find Quintus Curtius quoted by any author, who has wrote within the fourteen hundred years immediately posterior to the reign of Augustus. Notwithstanding this, the purity of the stile has such weight with others, as to make them judge that it is full that time since any one could write so pure Latin as is contained in the language of that book; and therefore they suppose the author of this history was contemporary with some of the first Cæsars. But be this as it may, the history, which goes under the title of Quintus Curtius, continued to be universally applauded for the space of three centuries; when at length a modern critic set himself to scrutinize and examine it attentively, and found it to be full of substantial defects. VI. This was the famous John Le Clerc, who weaves into the end of his second volume on the Art of Criticism, a long examination of Quintus Curtius, and arraigns and charges him, proving the accusation at the same time, with having been deficient in the following requisites: that he was very ignorant of astronomy and geography: that, for the sake of accumulating in his history many marvellous relations, he wrote many fables: that he described some things ill, and fell into manifest contradictions: that he inserted useless accounts, and omitted necessary ones: that, in order to display his eloquence, he incurred the impropriety of putting excellent harangues into the mouths of men, who had but little pretensions to oratory: that he gave Greek names to the most remote rivers of Asia: that he omitted the circumstance of dates or time in his relations of events: that he had chosen a stile which was better suited to a declaimer or an orator than an historian: that, finally, he had been more the panegyrist than the historian of Alexander, and had celebrated his damnable ambition, as if it had been an heroic virtue.