read them with real interest.
As I turned the pages I was reminded once more how impossible it is to
know the past. The past survives in human institutions, in the
temperament of races, and in the creations of ideal art; but only in the
last is it immortal. Custom and law are for an age: race after race is
pushed to the sea, and dies; only epic and saga and psalm have one date
with man, one destiny with the breath of his lips, one silence at the
last with them. Least of all does the past survive in the living
memories of men. Here and there the earth cherishes a coin or a statue,
the desert embalms some solitary city, a few leagues of rainless air
preserve on rock and column the lost speech of Nile; so the mind of man
holds in dark places, or lifts to living fame, no more than ruins and
fragments of the life that was. I have been a diligent reader of books
in my time; and here in an obscure corner of the Old-World I find a
narrative studded with noble names, not undistinguished by stirring
deeds, and, save for the great movements of history and a few shadowy
figures, it is all fresh to my mind. I have looked on three thousand
years of human life upon this hill; something of what they have yielded,
if you will have patience with such a tract of time, I will set down.

My author is Monsignore Giovanni di Giovanni, a Taorminian, who
flourished in the last century. He was a man of vast erudition, and
there is in his pages the Old-World learning which delights me. He was
born before the days of historic doubt. He tells a true story. To allege
an authority is with him to prove a fact, and to cite all writers who
repeat the original source is to render truth impregnable. Rarely does
he show any symptom of the modern malady of incredulity. _Scripta
littera_ is reason enough, unless the fair fame of his city chances to
be at stake. He was really learned, and I do wrong to seem to diminish
his authority. He was a patient investigator of manuscripts, and did
important service to Sicilian history. The simplicity I have alluded to
affects mainly the ecclesiastical part of his narrative. A few
statements also in regard to the prehistoric period might disturb the
modern mind, but I own to finding in them the charm of lost things. In
my mental provinces I welcome the cave-man, the flint-maker, the
lake-dweller, and all their primitive tribes to the abode of science;
but I feel them to be intruders in my antiquity. I was brought up on