later evangils of democracy as he did of the Daguerreotype and the electric telegraph. In this way Cade, Richard, and a thousand others are in the hands of the historians, tricked out as much in the colors of imagination as in those of fact. No man can be sure of the lesser details of the annals, though he may put faith in some of their great facts. We are not indisposed to allow that there was a man named Julius Cæsar; though whether he ever said, _Quid times? vehis Cæzarem_, in the boat, or _Et tu Brute!_ when the republicans set upon him in the senate-house, is not quite so credible. Most of these picturesque properties of character or fact, so to speak, are furnished by the fancies and after-thoughts of the narrators, or fabricated wilfully for a purpose. We need not go very far back in history to discover the truth of this. In a late memoir (Achille de Vaulabelle’s) of the “Two Restorations,” we are told that an old story of the consternation of the members of the Directory, on its violent dissolution by Bonaparte, in 1800, was a false one. There was no hurry-skurry, nor jumping out of windows, any more than when Oliver Cromwell put an end to the Long Parliament. Again, that glorification made on the sinking of the _Vengeur_, in an engagement with the English fleet, during the first French revolution, has been latterly put out of countenance. The story in France was, that, being terribly damaged, this ship sunk with all on board, her flag flying, and the crew shouting, “Long live the republic!” Carlyle adopted this version in his history, and makes quite a cartoon of it, in his own outlandish phraseology. But on the appearance of the story in an English work, a naval officer who witnessed the affair of the _Vengeur_, wrote a letter to the Times, in which he stated that, instead of going down with true republican devotion, the poor French sailors, small blame to them! jumped overboard, and tried to save themselves, and that some hundreds of them were rescued in the British boats. That message, said to have come from the dying Dessaix to Bonaparte, on the field of Marengo, (“Tell the First Consul I die regretting I can no farther serve him and France,”) was fabricated in the bulletin by the aforesaid consul himself. The story of the Duke of Wellington lying in the hollow square of the Guards at Waterloo, and, on the advance of the French, crying, “Up, Guards, and at them!” is as untenable as our own famous saying—“A little more grape, Captain Bragg!” or the military speeches of the great generals of antiquity, as recorded by Tacitus, Sallust, Cæsar, and the rest of the writers. Then, as regards great facts, different nations give different accounts. Ask who gained Waterloo? “We did,” say the Prussians. “We gave vast assistance,” say the Belgians. Ask John Bull, or rather, don’t; his answer would be rather brief than polite. We should like to see a history of the campaigns in Greece of Darius, Xerxes, and Mardonius, written by Persians.