redulity, and fraud, we disbelieve everything for which
we cannot find contemporary evidence, and from the value of that
evidence we subtract whatever may be due to prevalent opinion or
superstition. To the mediaeval writer, the more stupendous the miracle
the more likely it was to be true; he believed everything which he
could not prove to be false, and proof was not external testimony, but
inherent fitness.

So much for the second period of what is called human history. In the
first or mythological there is no historical groundwork at all. In the
next or heroic we have accounts of real persons, but handed down to
us by writers to whom the past was a world of marvels, whose delight
was to dwell upon the mighty works which had been done in the old
times, whose object was to elevate into superhuman proportions the
figures of the illustrious men who had distinguished themselves as
apostles or warriors. They thus appear to us like their portraits in
stained-glass windows, represented rather in a transcendental
condition of beatitude than in the modest and checkered colors of real
life. We see them not as they were, but as they appeared to an adoring
imagination, and in a costume of which we can only affirm with
certainty that it was never worn by any child of Adam on this plain,
prosaic earth. For facts as facts there is as yet no appreciation;
they are shifted to and fro, dropped out of sight, or magnified, or
transferred from owner to owner,--manipulated to suit or decorate a
preconceived and brilliant idea. We are still in the domain of poetry,
where the canons of the art require fidelity to general principles,
and allow free play to fancy in details. The Virgins of Raphael are no
less beautiful as paintings, no less masterpieces of workmanship,
though in no single feature either of face or form or costume they
resemble the historical mother of Christ, or even resemble one
another.

At the next stage we pass with the chroniclers into history proper.
The chronicler is not a poet like his predecessor. He does not shape
out consistent pictures with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He is
a narrator of events, and he connects them together on a chronological
string. He professes to be relating facts. He is not idealizing, he is
not singing the praises of the heroes of the sword or the crosier; he
means to be true in the literal and commonplace sense of that
ambiguous word. And yet in his earlier phases, take him in what