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"Such was General Kosciusko; such was the model of disinterestedness, of tempered valor, and of public virtue which his annalist sought to set forth in the foregoing pages; such was the man who honored their narrator with his approval and esteem! and in that last word she feels a privilege, but with due humility, to thus link some little memorial of herself to after times, by so uniting to the name of Thaddeus Kosciusko that of his humble but sincere aspirer to such themes,
Thus, while Marion is everywhere regarded as the peculiar representative in the southern States, of the genius of partisan warfare, we are surprised, when we would trace, in the pages of the annalist, the sources of this fame, to find the details so meagre and so unsatisfactory.
This is a benefit which the inquirer into antiquity so seldom can obtain that the fact of possessing it, in the case 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.
The following anecdote, printed and published by our revolutionary annalist, Prudhomme, will give you some idea of the morality of this our regenerator and Imperial Solon: "Cavaignac and another deputy, Pinet," writes Prudhomme, "had ordered a box to be kept for them at the play-house at Bayonne on the evening they expected to arrive in that town.
It is true that a renowned annalist, whose information is sustained by the collected wisdom of a State Historical Society, does tell us that the enemy possessed both shores of Lake Erie in 1814; but this was so small a mistake, compared with some others that this Nestor in history had made, that we shall not stop to explain it.
To conclude this review of the Huron-Iroquois group, something further should be said about the fortunes of the parent tribe, or rather congeries of tribes, for the Huron household, like the Iroquois, had become divided into several septs. Like the Iroquois, also, they have not lacked an annalist of their own race.
In much the same spirit, Camden speaks of the Elizabethan Thanet folks as 'a sort of amphibious creatures, equally skilled in holding helm and plough'; while Lewis, early in the last century, tells us they made 'two voyages a year to the North Seas, and came home soon enough for the men to go to the wheat season. With genial tolerance the Georgian historian adds, 'It's a thousand pities they are so apt to pilfer stranded ships. Piracy, which ran in the Thanet blood, seemed to their good easy local annalist a regrettable peccadillo.
Virgil himself transferred whole lines and passages, not merely from earlier, but even from contemporary poets; and in prose writing, one annalist cut up and reshaped the work of another with as little hesitation as a mediaeval romance-writer. In this matter Livy allowed himself full liberty; and his work absorbed, and in a great measure blotted out, those of his predecessors.
The residence of the Bishop was undoubtedly at first the residence of the Counts, and the tradition which places its transfer as far back as the days of Ingelger can hardly be traced to any earlier source than the local annalist of the seventeenth century.
Nay, not only are these particulars related as to the First Reading recorded as having been given by a Great Author, but, further than that, there is the charming incident described of Thucydides, then a boy of fifteen, listening entranced among the audience to the heroic occurrences recounted by the sonorous and impassioned voice of the annalist, and at the climax of it all bursting into tears.
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