“I cannot describe to you the feelings of respect and regret with which I walked over the ground that covered the remains of these young heroes. I had not long before visited the field of Marathon, and the recollections of it, and of Dr. Johnson’s effusion, were fresh in my mind; but the impressions of both were cold and feeble compared with those of Drageschan. Here was an act of courage and self–devotion among modern Greeks, that rivalled anything similar in the best days of their ancestors, and I was on the spot while the event was yet recent, and their bodies, if I may so say, scarce cold in the clay that covered them. No one has hitherto dared to erect a tomb to designate the spot where they lie, but they live imperishably in the memory of their country; and when England and her allies shall replace it in its due rank among the nations of Christian Europe, a monument on the field of Drageschan will not be forgotten.”[41] The battle of Roncesvalles occupies the same prominent station in romance that Thermopylæ does in history. There are few who have not heard in childhood, how the twelve peers of Charlemagne, unequalled in arms, were surrounded by the Saracens in that fatal valley, and slain with their followers to a man, after performing prodigies of valour; or who have read the tale without hating the traitor Ganellon, the Ephialtes of the Christian army. The fact is simply this: Charlemagne’s rearguard, as he returned from an invasion of Spain, was surrounded and cut off with its commander, his nephew Roland or Orlando (the rest of the Paladins are chiefly fabulous), not by the Saracens, but by the Pyrenean mountaineers. The mighty superstructure of falsehood which has been raised on this foundation owes its existence chiefly to the pretended Chronicle of Turpin, Archbishop of Rheims, contemporary with Charlemagne; a work whose real author has not been ascertained, but which was not written before the eleventh century. Its monstrous fictions were pronounced authentic by Pope Calixtus II., A.D. 1122, and have been carefully embodied in the Chronicles of the monks of St. Denys, the most voluminous compilers of their age. So much for the way in which history is manufactured. It has been freely translated by Caxton, and enlarged with incidents from other sources, in a book entitled “The Hystory and Lyf of the Most Noble Crysten Prince Charles the Grete, Kyng of Fraunce and Emperour of Rome, reduced from the latyn and romaunse tongue to thexaltacyon of the crysten faith, and the confusyon of the hethen Sarazyns and myscreants, which is a werk wel contemplatyf for to lyve wel.—The which werk was fynysshed in the reducing of hit into englysshe the xviii day of Juyn, the second yere of Kyng Richard the thyrd, the yere of our Lord Mcccclxxxv. And imprynted the fyrst day of decembre, the same yere of our Lorde, and the fyrst yere of Kyng Harry the seventh.” This book is a good specimen