If Plutarch censured Herodotus for not having sufficiently extolled the fame of some of the Grecian cities, and for omitting many known facts worthy of being recorded, how much more censurable are certain of our modern writers, who, without any of the merits of Herodotus, impute both to princes and to nations acts of the most odious character, without the slightest proof or evidence? The history of the war in 1741 has been written in England; and it relates, "that at the battle of Fontenoy the French fired at the English balls and pieces of glass which had been prepared with poison; and that the duke of Cumberland sent to the king of France a box full of those alleged poisonous articles, which had been found in the bodies of the wounded English." The same author adds, that the French having lost in that battle forty thousand men, the parliament issued an order to prevent people from talking on the subject, under pain of corporal punishment.
The fraudulent memoirs published not long since under the name of Madame de Maintenon, abound with similar absurdities. We are told in them, that at the siege of Lille the allies threw placards into the city, containing these words: "Frenchmen, be comforted—Maintenon shall never be your queen."
Almost every page is polluted by false statements and abuse of the royal family and other leading families in the kingdom, without the author's making out the smallest probability to give a color to his calumnies. This is not writing history; it is writing slanders which deserve the pillory.
A vast number of works have been printed in Holland, under the name of history, of which the style is as vulgar and coarse as the abuse, and the facts as false as they are ill-narrated. This, it has been observed, is a bad fruit of the noble tree of liberty. But if the contemptible authors of this trash have the liberty thus to deceive their readers, it becomes us here to take the liberty to undeceive them.
A thirst for despicable gain, and the insolence of vulgar and grovelling manners, were the only motives which led that Protestant refugee from Languedoc, of the name of Langlevieux, but commonly called La Beaumelle, to attempt the most infamous trick that ever disgraced literature. He sold to Eslinger, the bookseller of Frankfort, in 1751, for seventeen louis d'or, the "History of the Age of Louis XIV.," which is not his; and, either to make it believed that he was the proprietor, or to earn his money, he loaded it with abusive and abominable notes against Louis XIV., his son, and his grandson, the duke of Burgundy, whom he abuses in the most unmeasured terms, and calls a traitor to his grandfather and his country. He pours upon the duke of Orleans, the regent, calumnies at once the most horrible and the most absurd; no person of consequence is spared, and yet no person of consequence did he ever know. He retails against the marshals Villars and Villeroi, against ministers, and even against ladies, all the petty, dirty, and scandalous tales that could be collected from the lowest taverns and wine-houses; and he speaks of the greatest princes as if they were amenable to himself, and under his own personal jurisdiction. He expresses himself, indeed, as if he were a formal and authorized judge of kings: "Give me," says he, "a Stuart, and I will make him king of England."
This most ridiculous and abominable conduct, proceeding from an author obscure and unknown, has incurred no prosecution; it would have been severely punished in a man whose words would have carried any weight. But we must here observe, that these works of darkness frequently circulate through all Europe; they are sold at the fairs of Frankfort and Leipsic, and the whole of the North is overrun with them. Foreigners, who are not well informed, derive from books of this description their knowledge of modern history. German authors are not always sufficiently on their guard against memoirs of this character, but employ them as materials; which has been the case with the memoirs of Pontis, Montbrun, Rochefort, and Pordac; with all the pretended political testaments of ministers of state, which have proceeded from the pen of forgery; with the "Royal Tenth" of Boisguillebert, impudently published under the name of Marshal Vauban; and with innumerable compilations of anas and anecdotes.
History is sometimes even still more shamefully abused in England. As there are always two parties in furious hostility against each other, until some common danger for a season unites them, the writers of one faction condemn everything that the others approve. The same individual is represented as a Cato and a Catiline. How is truth to be extricated from this adulation and satire? Perhaps there is only one rule to be depended upon, which is, to believe all the good which the historian of a party ventures to allow to the leaders of the opposite faction; and all the ills which he ventures to impute to the chiefs of his own—a rule, of which neither party can severely complain.
With regard to memoirs actually written by agents in the events recorded, as those of Clarendon, Ludlow, and Burnet, in England, and de la Rochefoucauld and de Retz in France, if they agree, they are true; if they contradict each other, doubt them.
With respect to anas and anecdotes, there may perhaps be one in a hundred of them that contain some shadow of truth.