Arnold calls history the vast Mississippi of falsehood. The untruths that have been published about Allen during the last hundred and fifteen years might not fill and overflow the Ohio branch of such a Mississippi, but they would make a lively rivulet run until it was dammed by its own silt. The late Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield, fought a duel with Daniel O'Connell, because O'Connell declared it to be his belief that Disraeli was a lineal descendant of the impenitent thief on the Cross. Perhaps the libellers of Allen are descended from the Yorkers whom he stamped so ignominiously with the beech seal. The fierce light of publicity perhaps never beat upon a throne more sharply than for more than a hundred years it has beat upon Ethan Allen. His patriotism, courage, religious belief, and general character have been travestied and caricatured until now the real man has to be dug up from heaps of untruthful rubbish, as the peerless Apollo Belvidere was dug in the days of Columbus from the ruins of classic Antium. Discrepancies exist even in regard to his age. On the stone tablet over his grave his age is given as fifty years. Thompson said his age was fifty-two. At the unveiling of his statue, he was called thirty-eight years old when Ticonderoga was taken. These three statements are erroneous, and, strange to say, Burlington is responsible for them all, Burlington, the Athens of Vermont, the town wherein rest his ashes, the town wherein most of the last two years of his life were passed, and the town that has done most to honor his memory. However humiliating it may be to state pride, it is probable that the Allens, centuries ago, were no more respectable than the ancestors of Queen Victoria and the oldest British peers. The different ways of spelling the name, Alleyn, Alain, Allein, and Allen, seem to indicate a Norman origin. George Allen, professor in the University of Pennsylvania, says that Alain had command of the rear of William the Conqueror's army at the battle of Hastings in 1066.