Thus runs the old story. The question naturally arises, What of all this is truth, and what fiction? just as it will in the case of Winkelried and others. The question is easier to ask than to answer, at least in the very limited space at our disposal. The truth is, this question has been for half a century the subject of controversy always lively, often passionate and violent. Some authorities are for making a clean sweep of all traditional annals, and all semi-mythical national heroes. Others, no less able and conscientious, and no less learned, have re-admitted tradition to investigation, and have made it their special care to pick out the historical grain from the chaff of fiction. It is impossible within the limits of our space to discuss the merits of the numerous chronicles, and popular songs and plays, in which the traditions of the Tell period are preserved. Suffice it to say, that the "White Book of Sarnen" (1470), naïve and artless as is its tone, is the most trustworthy; that of the "Swiss Herodotus," the patriotic Tschudi (1570), the most fascinating and most skilfully penned. The work of the latter is mainly a series of gleanings from the "White Book," together with additional pictures from Tschudi's own pencil. He combined and supplied dates and minor details, and cast the whole in a mould apparently so historical that it became an authority for Joh von Müller, the great Swiss historian of the eighteenth century. And the immortal Schiller deeply stirred by the grand epic, produced his magnificent drama, "William Tell." It hardly needs to be said in these days that whilst no one thinks of taking these beautiful old-world stories literally, yet few of us would care to toss them contemptuously and entirely on one side. Truly they have a meaning, if not exactly that which was once accepted. In the present instance they represent and illustrate a long epoch during which a high-spirited people were engaged in establishing a confederation, and maintaining it against a powerful enemy--one long effort to secure emancipation from Habsburg tyranny--an epoch which opened with the acquisition of a charter of liberties for Uri in 1231, and closed with the brilliant victory of Morgarten in 1315. It remains now to show briefly what may be considered the authentic history of the period, that is, the history as found in authentic documents.