eserve. The case of public
buildings, of which Burma apparently stands much in need, is different.
They cannot, strictly speaking, be said to be remunerative, and should
almost, if not quite, invariably be paid for out of revenue.

[Footnote 87: _Burma under British Rule_. By Joseph Dautremer. London:
T. Fisher Unwin. 15s.]

XVII

A PSEUDO-HERO OF THE REVOLUTION[88]

_"The Spectator," July 5, 1913_

If it be a fact, as Carlyle said, that "History is the essence of
innumerable biographies," it is very necessary that the biographies from
which that essence is extracted should be true. It was probably a
profound want of confidence in the accuracy of biographical writing that
led Horace Walpole to beg for "anything but history, for history must be
false." Modern industry and research, ferreting in the less frequented
bypaths of history, have exposed many fictions, and have often led to
some strikingly paradoxical conclusions. They have substituted for
Cambronne's apocryphal saying at Waterloo the blunt sarcasm of the Duke
of Wellington that there were a number of ladies at Brussels who were
termed "la vieille garde," and of whom it was said "elles ne meurent
pas et se rendent toujours." They have led one eminent historian to
apologise for the polygamous tendencies of Henry VIII.; another to
advance the startling proposition that the "amazing" but, as the world
has heretofore held, infamous Emperor Heliogabalus was a great religious
reformer, who was in advance of his times; a third to present Lucrezia
Borgia to the world as a much-maligned and very virtuous woman; and a
fourth to tell us that the "ever pusillanimous" Barere, as he is called
by M. Louis Madelin, was "persistently vilified and deliberately
misunderstood." Biographical research has, moreover, destroyed many
picturesque legends, with some of which posterity cannot part without a
pang of regret. We are reluctant to believe that William Tell was a
mythological marksman and Gessler a wholly impossible bailiff.
Nevertheless the inexorable laws of evidence demand that this sacrifice
should be made on the altar of historical truth. M. Gastine has now
ruthlessly quashed out another picturesque legend. Tallien--the
"bristly, fox-haired" Tallien of Carlyle's historical rhapsody--and La
Cabarrus--the fair Spanish Proserpine whom, "Pluto-like, he gathered at
Bordeaux"--have so far floated down the tide of history as individuals
who, like Byron's Corsair, wer