Half a century ago it was deemed necessary, particularly by writers of selected epochs of history, in order to clothe their narrative with dramatic effect equal to fiction, to intensify characters and events. The good qualities of good men were made to stand out in bold relief, not against their own bad qualities, but against the bad qualities of bad men, whose wickedness was portrayed in such black colors as to overshadow whatever of good they might possess. Thus historical episodes were endowed, so far as possible without too great discoloration of truth, like a theatrical performance, each with a perfected hero and a finished villain. Of this class of writers were Macaulay and Motley, Froude, Freeman, Prescott, and Irving, whose works are wonderful in their way, not only as art-creations, but as the truest as well as most vivid pictures of their several periods yet presented, and which for generations will be read with that deep and wholesome interest with which they deserve to be regarded. For, although their facts are sometimes highly varnished, their most brilliant creations are always built upon a substantial skeleton of truth. I say that these, the foremost writers of their day, are none of them free from the habit of exaggeration, deception. Indeed, with a wasteful extravagance in the use of superlatives it is almost impossible to draw character strongly without in some parts of it exaggerating. But in these days of rational reflection wherein romance and reality are fairly separated, celestial fiction and mundane fact being made to pass under the same _experimentum crucis_; mind becoming so mechanical that it introverts and analyzes not only its own mechanism but the mechanism of its maker; iconoclasm becoming spiritualized, and the doctrine revived of the old Adamic serpent, that the knowledge of good and evil is not death but life and immortality, this knowledge being king of kings, vying with nature's forces and oftentimes defying them—I say, in days like these mature manhood becomes impatient of the Santa Claus, or other fictitious imagery, from which the infant mind derives much comfort, and prefers, if necessary, the torments of truth to the elysium of fable. It is no longer valid logic that if the hero stoops to trickery, his biographer should stoop to trickery to cover it. For once undertake to shape the stiff clay of material facts into the artistic forms of fiction, and the result is neither history nor romance. [Sidenote: WASHINGTON IRVING.]