And even as regards the more modern and authentic annals of history, we do not think they have paid much more respect to the actual truth of things than do the fictionists. Sir Robert Walpole used to say to his friends, “Don’t read history; that must be false.” And Sir Walter Raleigh, looking from the window of his prison in the Tower, and witnessing a quarrel in the court-yard or the street, and the after-testimony of the by-standers respecting it, was tempted, it is said, to throw his History of the World into the fire, in despair of ever being able to gather any thing like truth from conflicting authorities. And, certainly, the differences of historians—their doubts concerning motives, and their disagreements concerning facts, tend to give us very unsettled ideas of history in general. Writers have sent Col. Kirke down to us from James the Second’s reign with a very black and bloody renown. But he was not half so black as he was painted by the whigs; and the story of the poor girl whose husband he hanged before her eyes, in the morning, though she had dearly purchased his life on Kirke’s own terms, is pronounced by Ritson to be an impudent and bare-faced lie. The story is much older than Kirke. Richard the Third is also one of the historical reprobates; though it is not unlikely that the young princes were not murdered in the Tower, and that Perkin Warbeck was really the prince after all; as truly as the surreptitious, warming-pan prince is known to have been the true son of James the Second, in spite of the Protestant historians. Then there are Jack Cade and Wat Tyler; these have been receiving cruel wrong at the hands of the annalists. They dared, in an age when the rights of the people were imperfectly understood, and the influence of the feudal system still strong in the nation, to take up arms and go to war with the king and the nobles for liberty! Their sufferings and provocations were undeniable, and their spirit was certainly heroic—kindred to that which glowed in the bosoms of Melchthal, Furst, and Stauffacher, at the Brunnens of Grutli. The Swiss peasants were successful, and are held in honorable remembrance forever. But the Englishmen failed, and are set up as scarecrows and _Indibria_, upon the field of history. Poor Tyler and Cade were animated by the same kind of blood which boiled in the face of a tyrant at Naseby, Marston Moor, Dunbar, and elsewhere—which warmed the hearts of the exiles on the cold rock of Plymouth, and flowed so freely at Lexington and Bunker Hill. We should honor these English rebels—in spite of history, and in spite of Shakspeare. It is remarkable to see this myriad-minded man, so full of the finer humanities of our nature, yet incapable of sympathizing with the cause and feelings of the mass of the lower classes. But Shakspeare was a man of his era—to which, with an astonishing and happy wizardry, he obliged chronology and human nature to conform; he dreamed as little of the