Du Pan, in his Recherches sur les Américains, says that Montezuma sacrificed annually twenty thousand children to the idols in the temples of Mexico. In such assertions the improbability and exaggeration are so self-evident that it is needless to dwell upon them.
“Books,” says the Prince de Ligne, “tell us that the Duke of Alba put to death by the hands of the executioner in the Low Countries eighteen thousand gentlemen, while the fact is that scarcely two thousand could have been altogether collected there.
Who is there who now believes in the story of Dionysius the Tyrant becoming a schoolmaster at Corinth?[1]
Even in the time of Titus Livius there was so much doubt as to the truth of the legend of the Horatii and the Curiatii, that he writes, one cannot tell to which of the two contending people the Horatii or the Curiatii[2] belonged. Yet this cautious historian relates in another place how Hannibal fed his soldiers on human flesh to give them energy and courage. Mr. Rey[3] has carefully studied the origin of the heroic fable of the death of Regulus, and has exposed its fallacy.
In comparatively modern times also, how many delusions do we find worthy of ancient history. The story of the Sicilian Vespers,[4] for instance, and the episode concerning Doctor Procida, who far from being a principal in the massacre, was not even present at it. We may also mention some of the anecdotes of Christopher Columbus:[5] the fable of the egg that he is said to have broken, in order to make it stand upright: the account of his anxiety, amounting to agony, among his mutinous crew, to whom he had faithfully promised a sight of land—all of which has been disproved by M. de Humboldt in his Examen critique de l’Histoire de la Géographie.
The history of England also furnishes many examples of similar credulity. Without entering upon the murder of King Edward’s children, which story has been discussed by Walpole, may we not cite the death of the Duke of Clarence, who for four centuries was believed to have been drowned in a butt of Malmsey?—an error exposed by John Bayley in “The historic Antiquities of the Tower of London.”
We may cite again the often-mooted question of the exhumation of the body of Cromwell, and of the outrages committed on his remains by order of Charles II:[6] the interesting but imaginative picture of Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters, while, if we may believe Doctor Johnson, he never even allowed them to learn to write. Modern historians, however, are often equally incorrect. Among them we may quote the poet laureate Southey, who was guilty of a remarkable perversion of facts regarding one of the wisest men of the 19th century.
In an article in the Quarterly Review (Vol. XXXIX. p. 477. April 1829) entitled, State and Prospects of the Country, we are told that Conrad, a monk of Heresbach, had pronounced in presence of an assembly, an anathema against Greek, saying that: “a new language had been discovered called Greek, against which it was necessary to guard, as this language engendered every species of heresy; just as all they who learned Hebrew, infallibly became Jews.”
This curious anecdote was repeated in La Revue Britannique, No. 46. p. 254, whence it found its way into a note of the Poème de la Typographie of M. Pelletier (1 vol. 8ᵛᵒ. Genève, 1832) and the mistake was republished in many other books. Now the real fact is, that Conrad of Heresbach had never been a monk, but was a confidential counsellor of the Duke of Cleves, and that, far from prohibiting the study of the ancient languages, he was one of the savans of the 16th century who shewed the greatest zeal in encouraging a taste for their culture. It is he himself who, in order to expose the ignorance of the clergy of that period, relates, that he heard a monk from the pulpit pronounce the anathema on the Greek language which we have mentioned above. So easy is it, by distorting facts, to make or mar a reputation!
When we reflect on the innumerable errors daily propagated by books, we have cause to be alarmed at the strange confusion in which all literature may find itself a few centuries hence. It is very possible that historical events will be even more difficult of proof than before the invention of printing, which may consequently have served to augment disorder and perplexity rather than to have assisted in the promotion of truth and accuracy. In a recent number of the Constitutionnel, in a feuilleton supposed to be from the pen of M. de Lamartine, it is stated that: “The tombs of great poets inspire great passions. It was at Tasso’s tomb,” he says, “that Petrarch, during his first absence, nourished his regretful remembrance of Laura!” Now Petrarch died in 1374, and it was more than two hundred years afterwards (in 1581) that Tasso published his first edition of the Gerusalemme Liberata!