ed this account
according as the first reports gave out; when at length the real fact
reached them, the party did not like to lose their pretended victory."
Pere Londel, who published a register of the times, which is favourably
noticed in the "Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres," for 1699, has
recorded the event in this deceptive manner: "The Battle of the Boyne in
Ireland; Schomberg is killed there at the head of the English." This is
"an equivocator!" The writer resolved to conceal the defeat of James's
party, and cautiously suppresses any mention of a victory, but very
carefully gives a real fact, by which his readers would hardly doubt of
the defeat of the English! We are so accustomed to this traffic of false
reports, that we are scarcely aware that many important events recorded
in history were in their day strangely disguised by such mystifying
accounts. This we can only discover by reading private letters written
at the moment. Bayle has collected several remarkable absurdities of
this kind, which were spread abroad to answer a temporary purpose, but
which had never been known to us had these contemporary letters not been
published. A report was prevalent in Holland in 1580, that the kings of
France and Spain and the Duke of Alva were dead; a felicity which for a
time sustained the exhausted spirits of the revolutionists. At the
invasion of the Spanish Armada, Burleigh spread reports of the
thumb-screws, and other instruments of torture, which the Spaniards had
brought with them, and thus inflamed the hatred of the nation. The
horrid story of the bloody Colonel Kirk is considered as one of those
political forgeries to serve the purpose of blackening a zealous
partisan.

False reports are sometimes stratagems of war. When the chiefs of the
League had lost the battle at Ivry, with an army broken and discomfited
they still kept possession of Paris merely by imposing on the
inhabitants all sorts of false reports, such as the death of the king of
Navarre at the fortunate moment when victory, undetermined on which side
to incline, turned for the Leaguers; and they gave out false reports of
a number of victories they had elsewhere obtained. Such tales,
distributed in pamphlets and ballads among a people agitated by doubts
and fears, are gladly believed; flattering their wishes or soothing
their alarms, they contribute to their ease, and are too agreeable to
allow time for reflection.

The history of a report cre