rmed a slender basis of historic
fact on which to found it.

"'Nor is the particularity of some of the dates and alleged
circumstances of much weight in our judgment. He must be a miserable
inventor of fiction indeed, who cannot clothe a narrative in some
verisimilitude of this kind. It is said, that the historian makes a
seeming reference to those who were living at the very time.
"Some," he says, "still survive." But who does not see that the
word "survive" may refer to the accounts (which he, it appears,
knew little how to interpret), not the persons; though, be it observed,
that on such a supposition he does not vouch for having seen them,
and may have spoken merely from report. This very clause, too, has
undeniably much the appearance of an interpolation. There are many
other little circumstances, which, to those who have been accustomed
to detect unhistoric characteristics in ancient documents, and to
draw a sharp line between the mythic or allegoric and the historic,
sufficiently proclaim the origin of this supposed narrative of facts.

"'But the internal evidence, conclusive as it is, is as nothing to
the external. If we examine the document by the light of the facts
which contemporary history supplies, nay, even by the probability or
otherwise of its own contents, we shah see the extreme absurdity of
supposing that the account from which it was borrowed was ever meant
to be a record of facts. We hesitate not to say, that the political
facts of which it makes mention are many of them in the highest degree
incredible. That there may have been a rebellion at Rome is very
possible; but assuredly the only nation in Europe, (if we except
England,) that was not likely to take the Pope's part against a
republican movement, or resent him on his throne, was the French.
To suppose them thus acting is contrary to all that we know of the
history of that nation, and of human nature. The traces of the terrible
revolutions which in that century, and at the close of the preceding
one, shook France again and again to her centre, and the outlines of
which still live in authentic history, all show the extent to which
infidelity and democratic violence prevailed in France; nay, we know
that during the dominion of the Emperor Napoleon, if we are to regard
his history as literally true, and not a collection of fables and
legends,* as some even of that age maintained, that great conqueror
arrested and imprisoned the Pope. That Franc