Many of these last, in fact, are little better than the fictions of poets, dramatists and romancers. The histories of the venerable Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, etc. are half imaginative. There are outlines of truth in them— “The truth is there; but dashed and brewed with lies.” The history of Scotland, for ages, from the reign of Fergus, and of Ireland from the days of Heber, Heremon and Ith, down to the conquest of the country by Strongbow, are just as fanciful as the metrical romances of Scott and Moore. Then, for the annals of Greece; Herodotus, the patriarch of history, sets down almost every thing he hears from the lying priests of Egypt, or that he can gather from vague tradition; and people don’t exactly know whether to call the Cyropædia of Xenophon a romance or an authentic narration. Plutarch romances at times like the Scuderis. An old English author, Taylor, says, of his fallacies and blunders in the lives of the orators—_mendaxille Plutarchus qui vitas oratorum dolis et erroribus consutas, olim conscribillavit_. Neibuhr has got into our old history of Rome and laid about him like an iconoclast. He destroys a crowd of our beliefs, and makes a solitude in the first ages of Rome—so wonderful and picturesque in our school-boy days. He makes a solitude and calls it truth. He demolishes Mars, Rhea Sylvia, Romulus and Remus and the Wolf—Numitor, Evander, and so forth. Under the flourishing of his pen they make themselves into thin air in which they vanish. Then the Tarquins, their insolence and expulsion; Lars Porsenna of Clusium, the siege of Rome, Cocles on the Bridge and Scævola at the flaming Altar—all are inventions of Fabius Pictor, Ennius, Nævius, and others. This portion of the history of Rome, says the German, should be called the Lay of the Tarquins, and is just as authentic as the Lay of the Nibelungen! “Livy’s _pictored_ page,” (if we may be permitted to make a critical emendation of Byron’s phrase in the spirit of Bishop Warburton’s Notes on Shakspeare,) is allowed to be just as fallible as it is brilliant. Thus we have a vast amount of what is called ancient history confounded with the professed creations of fanciful minds; and there does not seem to be any very marked difference between Agamemnon or Ajax, and Cecrops or Codrus; between Æneas or Dido, and Numa or Clelia—they are all equally distinct or indistinct. Scott’s King Richard, singing a roundelay and exchanging a buffet with the Clerk of Copmanhurst, is as firm on the canvas as Alfred baking his cakes, or Canute sitting on a chair to rebuke his flatterers on the sea-shore.