be better
than the essay by Kuno Fischer, appended to the present volume. The
work of translation has been admirably done; and thanks are due to Miss
Frothingham for her reproduction of this beautiful poem.

June, 1868.

VIII. HISTORICAL DIFFICULTIES. [29]

[29] Historical Difficulties and Contested Events. By Octave
Delepierre, LL. D., F. S. A., Secretary of Legation to the King of the
Belgians. 8vo. London: Murray. 1868.

History, says Sainte-Beuve, is in great part a set of fables which
people agree to believe in. And, on reading books like the present,
one certainly needs a good deal of that discipline acquired by long
familiarity with vexed historical questions, in order to check the
disposition to accept the great critic's ironical remark in sober
earnest. Much of what is currently accredited as authentic history is in
fact a mixture of flattery and calumny, myth and fable. Yet in this set
of fables, whatever may have been the case in past times, people will
no longer agree to believe. During the present century the criticism
of recorded events has gone far toward assuming the developed and
systematized aspect of a science, and canons of belief have been
established, which it is not safe to disregard. Great occurrences,
such as the Trojan War and the Siege of Thebes, not long ago faithfully
described by all historians of Greece, have been found to be part of
the common mythical heritage of the Aryan nations. Achilleus and Helena,
Oidipous and Iokasta, Oinone and Paris, have been discovered in India
and again in Scandinavia, and so on, until their nonentity has become
the legitimate inference from their very ubiquity. Legislators
like Romulus and Numa, inventors like Kadmos, have evaporated
into etymologies. Whole legions of heroes, dynasties of kings, and
adulteresses as many as Dante saw borne on the whirlwind, have vanished
from the face of history, and terrible has been the havoc in the opening
pages of our chronological tables. Nor is it primitive history alone
which has been thus metamorphosed. Characters unduly exalted or defamed
by party spirit are daily being set before us in their true, or at least
in a truer, light. What Mr. Froude has done for Henry VIII. we know; and
he might have done more if he had not tried to do so much. Humpbacked
Richard turns out to have been one of the handsomest kings that ever sat
on the throne of England. Edward I., in his dealings with Scotland, is
seen