And I myself with a broad arrow
Will cleve the apple in two.”
In modern times the same skill is seen with the gun instead of with the cross-bow. Snuffing a candle, cutting a string, barking a squirrel, breaking glass balls thrown in the air, are all, perhaps, more difficult than for a firm hand and a steady eye to pick off an apple from the head of a boy. The same thing was done in the seventh century that is recorded of Tell in the fourteenth century, ergo William Tell is a myth,—this is the question reduced to a logical form. Any one may see that such an inference is absurd. Yet this is the greatest fact that has been adduced to prove that Tell’s heroism is a mere figment of the past. To believe in one tradition and repudiate the other is not less arbitrary than unphilosophic. Voltaire, whose function it was to deny, even sneered at the existence of the men of Rütli simply on account of “the difficulty in pronouncing their names.” The story of Tell is told in the chronicle of Klingenberg, that covers the close of the fourteenth century; then again in 1470, in the “Ballad of Tell,” one of the chief treasures in the archives of Sarnen; in the “Chronicles of Russ,” 1482; and by Schilling, of Luzern, in 1510, who had before him a “Tell-song;” and the chronicle of Eglof, town clerk of Luzern, in the first half of the fifteenth century. The first to clothe these traditions in the dress of historical narration of great substantial clearness was the celebrated Swiss chronicler, Ægidius Tschudi, of Glarus, in 1570. All the early Swiss and German historians, Stettler, Huldrich, and Müller, sanction it. Then it furnished Florian with the subject of a novel in French, 1788; Lemierre with his tragedy of Guillaume Tell, 1766; Schiller with a tragedy in German, Wilhelm Tell, 1804; Knowles with a tragedy in English, William Tell, 1840. In 1829, Rossini, the most famous composer of the land beyond the mountains, wove the magic of his music round Schiller’s greatest drama with the Italian opera of Guglielmo Tell, the delight of the musical world.[104] Smollett, in his sublime “Ode to Independence,” thus alludes to Tell:
“Who with the generous rustics sate
On Uri’s rock, in close divan,
And wing’d that arrow, sure as fate,
Which ascertain’d the sacred rights of man.”
Goethe writes: “I picture Tell as an heroic man, possessed of native strength, but contented with himself, and in a state of childish unconsciousness. He traverses the Canton as a carrier, and is everywhere known and beloved, everywhere ready with his assistance. He peacefully follows his calling, providing for his wife and child.” Sir James Mackintosh, one of the most impartial of historians, visited the region associated with the name and deeds of Tell; he examined history, and became perfectly convinced of the existence of the mountain hero, and of the truth of the part he played in Switzerland when
“Few were the numbers she could boast,
But every freeman was a host,