Unfortunately, such feats, as I have already said, imperil one's intellectual honesty, and one would not like to imitate the Byzantine historians who were given to similar tricks. One of these gentlemen, Choricius by name, had a seaport to describe. How the actual seaport lay mattered little to Choricius, so long as the Epidamnus of Thucydides was at hand; and if the task of narrating our Peloponnesian war were assigned to the ghost of Choricius, I have no doubt that he would open it with a description of Charleston in terms of Epidamnus. Little matters of topography would not trouble such an one. To the sophist an island is an island, a river a river, a height a height, everywhere. Sphacteria would furnish the model for Morris Island; the Achelous would serve indifferently for Potomac or Mississippi, the Epipolae for Missionary Ridge, Plataea for Vicksburg, the harbor of Syracuse for Hampton Roads; and Thucydides' description of the naval engagement and the watching crowds would be made available for the fight between Merrimac and Monitor. The debates in Thucydides would be a quarry for the debates in either Congress, as they had been a quarry for centuries of rhetorical historians. And as for the "winged words," why should they have wings, if not to flit from character to character? A well-known scholar, at a loss for authentic details as to the life of Pindar, fell back on a lot of apophthegms attributed to his hero, and in so doing maintained the strange doctrine that apophthegms were more to be trusted than any other form of tradition. There could not have been a more hopeless thesis. The general who said that he would burn his coat if it knew his plans has figured in all the wars with which I have been contemporary, was a conspicuous character in the Mexican war, and passed from camp to camp in the war between the States. The _mot_, familiar to the classical scholar, was doubtless attributed in his day to that dashing sheik Chedorlaomer, and will be ascribed to both leaders in the final battle of Armageddon. The hank of yarns told about Socrates is pieced out with tabs and tags borrowed from different periods. I have heard, say, in the afternoon, a good story at the expense of a famous American revival preacher which I had read that morning in the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, and there is a large stock of anecdotes made to screw on and screw off for the special behoof of college presidents and university professors. Why hold up Choricius to ridicule? He was no worse than others of his guild. It was not Choricius, it was another Byzantine historian who conveyed from Herodotus an unsavory retort, over which the unsuspecting Gibbon chuckles in the dark cellar of his notes, where he keeps so much of his high game. The Greek historian of the Roman Empire, the Roman historian of every date, are no better, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who has devoted many pages to the arraignment of Thucydides' style,