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"Posterity," says the French annalist, Feuqueres, "will scarcely believe the fact, though it is an undoubted truth. Never was a great enterprise conducted with more skill and circumspection." Prince Eugene was entrusted with the conduct of the siege, while Marlborough commanded the covering army.
Paltry skirmishes and plots are reported with absurd and useless minuteness; but improvements the most essential to the comfort of human life extend themselves over the world, and introduce themselves into every cottage, before any annalist can condescend, from the dignity of writing about generals and ambassadors, to take the least notice of them.
Their force was finally shattered at the battle of Clontarf, which the Annalist thus records: "1013: The Foreigners of the west of Europe assembled against Brian and Maelseaclain, and they took with them a thousand men with coats of mail.
Such is the whole story, as told in the bald and simple entries of the West Saxon annalist, A more dubious tradition further states that Ælle was also Bretwalda, or overlord, of all the Teutonic tribes in Britain. And now let us see what we can make of this wholly unhistorical and legendary tale.
He may be an annalist, or a biographer, or a chronicler, but higher than that he cannot rise, unless he is imbued with that spirit of science which teaches, as an article of faith, the doctrine of uniform sequence; in other words, the doctrine that certain events having already happened, certain other events corresponding to them will also happen.
Here we find piously chronicled the demise of jockeys, watermen, and pugilists Johnny Moore, of the Liverpool Prize Ring; Tom Spring, aged fifty-six; "Pierce Egan, senior, writer of 'Boxiana' and other sporting works" and among all these, the Duke of Wellington! If Benbow had lived in the time of this annalist, do you suppose his name would not have been added to the glorious roll?
But what will not serve as a document to the modern historian? The historian is no longer the poor creature described by Aristotle. He is no annalist, no chronicler. He is not dragged along by the mechanical sequence of events. "The master of them that know" did not know everything. He did not know that history was to become as plastic as poetry, as dramatic as a play.
The Portuguese cherished the belief in the mermaid, and the annalist of the exploits of the Jesuits in India, gravely records that seven of these monsters, male and female, were captured at Manaar in 1560, and carried to Goa, where they were dissected by Demas Bosquez, physician to the Viceroy, and "their internal structure found to be in all respects conformable to the human."
Seven months after the date assigned by the Margan annalist to Arthur's death in October, 1203 Philip owned himself ignorant whether the Duke of Brittany were alive or not. Clearly, therefore, it was not as the avenger of Arthur's murder that Philip took the field at the end of April.
This is a benefit which the inquirer into antiquity so seldom can obtain, that the fact of possessing it, in the instance of the battle of Tours, makes us think the historical testimony respecting that great event more certain and satisfactory than is the case in many other instances, where we possess abundant details respecting military exploits, but where those details come to us from the annalist of one nation only; and where we have, consequently, no safeguard against the exaggerations, the distortions, and the fictions which national vanity has so often put forth in the garb and under the title of history.
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