re told, "The bricks are alive to this day to testify to
it; therefore, deny it not." These proofs are not more valid than the
handkerchief of St. Veronica, or the fragments of the true cross. For if
relics are to be received as evidence, we must needs admit the truth of
every miracle narrated by the Bollandists.

The earliest work which makes any allusion to the adventures of William
Tell is the chronicle of the younger Melchior Russ, written in 1482. As
the shooting of the apple was supposed to have taken place in 1296, this
leaves an interval of one hundred and eighty-six years, during which
neither a Tell, nor a William, nor the apple, nor the cruelty of
Gessler, received any mention. It may also be observed, parenthetically,
that the charters of Kussenach, when examined, show that no man by
the name of Gessler ever ruled there. The chroniclers of the fifteenth
century, Faber and Hammerlin, who minutely describe the tyrannical acts
by which the Duke of Austria goaded the Swiss to rebellion, do not
once mention Tell's name, or betray the slightest acquaintance with his
exploits or with his existence. In the Zurich chronicle of 1479 he is
not alluded to. But we have still better negative evidence. John of
Winterthur, one of the best chroniclers of the Middle Ages, was living
at the time of the battle of Morgarten (1315), at which his father was
present. He tells us how, on the evening of that dreadful day, he saw
Duke Leopold himself in his flight from the fatal field, half dead with
fear. He describes, with the loving minuteness of a contemporary, all
the incidents of the Swiss revolution, but nowhere does he say a word
about William Tell. This is sufficiently conclusive. These mediaeval
chroniclers, who never failed to go out of their way after a bit of the
epigrammatic and marvellous, who thought far more of a pointed story
than of historical credibility, would never have kept silent about the
adventures of Tell, if they had known anything about them.

After this, it is not surprising to find that no two authors who
describe the deeds of William Tell agree in the details of topography
and chronology. Such discrepancies never fail to confront us when
we leave the solid ground of history and begin to deal with floating
legends. Yet, if the story be not historical, what could have been
its origin? To answer this question we must considerably expand the
discussion.

The first author of any celebrity who doubted the s