The art of writing history has two very distinct branches, the combination of which is essential to the production of a complete historian. A research into, and a criticism of, events with no other aim than to elicit truth, is one branch of the historical art; the other is the resolution to interpret, to describe, to give to each event its full signification and colouring; to put that life into it in fact which belongs to every human spectacle. It is only the first part of the task that we propose to undertake in these essays. Seneca has said that we must not give too ready credence to hearsay, for some disguise the truth in order to deceive, and some because they are themselves the victims of deception. Other Greek and Latin writers have also warned us against a too ready faith in popular traditions. How many errors bequeathed to us by the historians of antiquity owe their enlarged growth, ere they reached us, to their passage through the middle ages. De Quincy tells us that if a saying has a proverbial fame, the probability is that it was never said. The same opinion may be held of a great many so-called historical facts which are perfectly familiar even to the ignorant, and yet which never happened. The French critic Lenglet du Fresnoy, in his work “_L’Histoire justifiée contre les Romans_,” has devoted about 100 pages to historical doubts; but he only touches the surface of the subject. Many years before Niebuhr, the Abbé Lancellotti published at Venice in 1637, under the title of “_Farfalloni degli antichi Storici_,” a curious volume, now rare, in which he exposes the many absurd stories taught in schools as history. The book contains more than a hundred of these fictions, and was translated into French by T. Oliva 1770. Du Pan, in his _Recherches sur les Américains_, says that Montezuma sacrificed annually twenty thousand children to the idols in the temples of Mexico. In such assertions the improbability and exaggeration are so self-evident that it is needless to dwell upon them. “Books,” says the Prince de Ligne, “tell us that the Duke of Alba put to death by the hands of the executioner in the Low Countries eighteen thousand gentlemen, while the fact is that scarcely two thousand could have been altogether collected there. Who is there who now believes in the story of Dionysius the Tyrant becoming a schoolmaster at Corinth?[1] Even in the time of Titus Livius there was so much doubt as to the truth of the legend of the _Horatii_ and the _Curiatii_, that he writes, one cannot tell to which of the two contending people the Horatii or the Curiatii[2] belonged. Yet this cautious historian relates in another place how Hannibal fed his soldiers on human flesh to give them energy and courage. Mr. Rey[3] has carefully studied the origin of the heroic fable of the death of Regulus, and has exposed its fallacy.