least, are not learned enough in Latin to detect it; and Pollio, too,
appears to have been no gentle critic if we may judge by his equally
severe strictures upon Cicero, Cæsar, and Sallust. This much we know:
the Patavian's heroes live; his events happen, and we are carried
along upon their tide. Our sympathies, our indignation, our
enthusiasm, are summoned into being, and history and fiction appear to
walk hand in hand for our instruction and amusement. In this latter
word--fiction--lies the charge most often and most strongly made
against him--the charge that he has written a story and no more; that
with him past time existed but to furnish materials "to point a moral
or adorn a tale." Let us consider to what extent this is true, and, if
true, in what measure the author has sinned by it or we have lost.

No one would claim that the rules by which scientific historians of
to-day are judged should be applied to those that wrote when history
was young, when the boundaries between the possible and the impossible
were less clearly defined, or when, in fact, such boundaries hardly
existed in men's minds. In this connection, even while we vaunt, we
smile. After all, how much of our modern and so-called scientific
history must strike the reasoning reader as mere theorizing or as
special pleading based upon the slenderest evidence! Among the
ancients the work of the historians whom we consider trustworthy--such
writers, for instance, as Cæsar, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, and
Tacitus--may be said to fall generally within Rawlinson's canons 1 and
2 of historical criticism--that is, (1) cases where the historian has
personal knowledge concerning the facts whereof he writes, or (2)
where the facts are such that he may reasonably be supposed to have
obtained them from contemporary witnesses. Canon 2 might be elaborated
and refined very considerably and perhaps to advantage. It naturally
includes as sources of knowledge--first, personal interviews with