. Perhaps there
are one or two passages in Cervantes, and one or two in Fielding, that
might give a modern reader a notion of it.

I have very nearly finished Livy. I never read him through before. I
admire him greatly, and would give a quarter's salary to recover the
lost Decades. While I was reading the earlier books I went again
through Niebuhr. And I am sorry to say that, having always been a little
sceptical about his merits, I am now a confirmed unbeliever. I do not of
course mean that he has no merit. He was a man of immense learning, and
of great ingenuity. But his mind was utterly wanting in the faculty
by which a demonstrated truth is distinguished from a plausible
supposition. He is not content with suggesting that an event may have
happened. He is certain that it happened, and calls on the reader to be
certain too, (though not a trace of it exists in any record whatever,)
because it would solve the phenomena so neatly. Just read over again, if
you have forgotten it, the conjectural restoration of the Inscription in
page 126 of the second volume; and then, on your honour as a scholar and
a man of sense, tell me whether in Bentley's edition of Milton there is
anything which approaches to the audacity of that emendation. Niebuhr
requires you to believe that some of the greatest men in Rome were
burned alive in the Circus; that this event was commemorated by an
inscription on a monument, one half of which is sill in existence; but
that no Roman historian knew anything about it; and that all tradition
of the event was lost, though the memory of anterior events much less
important has reached our time. When you ask for a reason, he tells you
plainly that such a thing cannot be established by reason; that he is
sure of it; and that you must take his word. This sort of intellectual
despotism always moves me to mutiny, and generates a disposition to
pull down the reputation of the dogmatist. Niebuhr's learning was
immeasurably superior to mine; but I think myself quite as good a judge
of evidence as he was. I might easily believe him if he told me that
there were proofs which I had never seen; but, when he produces all his
proofs, I conceive that I am perfectly competent to pronounce on their
value.

As I turned over his leaves just now, I lighted on another instance
of what I cannot but call ridiculous presumption. He says that Martial
committed a blunder in making the penultimate of Porsena short. Strange
that so