HISTORICAL STANDARD OF CREDIBILITY. 485 lorical credibility, especially with regard to modern events, hag indeed been greatly and sensibly raised within the hist hundred years. But in regard to ancient Grecian history, the rules of evidence still continue relaxed. The dictum of Milton, regarding the ante- Csesarian history of England, still represents pretty exactly the feeling now prevalent respecting the mythical history of Greece " Yet those old and inborn kings (Agamemnon, Achilles, Odys- seus, Jason, Adrastus, Amphiaraus, Meleager, etc.), never any to have been real persons, or done in their lives at least some part of what so long hath been remembered, cannot be thought without too strict incredulity." Amidst much fiction (we are still told), there must be some truth : but how is such truth to be singled out ? Milton does not even attempt to make the seve- rance : he contents himself with " keeping aloof from the impos- sible and the absurd," and ends in a narrative which has indeed the merit of being sober-colored, but which he never for a moment thinks of recommending to his readers as true. So in regard to the legends of Greece, Troy, Thebes, the Argonauts, the Boar of Kalydon, Herakles, Theseus, QEdipus, the conviction still holds in men's minds, that there must be something true at the bottom ; and many readers of this work may be displeased, I fear, not to see conjured up before them the Eidolon of an au- thentic history, even though the vital spark of evidence be altogether wanting. 1 pcarc (London, 1754, vol. i. p. 112). In commenting on the passage in King Lear, Nero is an anyler in lite lake of darkness, he says, "This is one of Shakspeare's most remarkable anachronisms. King Lear succeeded his father Bladnd anno mundi 3105; and Nero, anno mundi 4017, was sixteen years old, when he married Octavia, Caesar's daughter. See Funcii Chro- nologia, p 94." Such a supposed chronological discrepancy would hardly be pointed out in any commentary now written. The introduction prefixed by Mr. Giles, to his recent translation of Geof- frey of Monmonth (1842), gives a just view both of the use which our old poets made of his tales, and of the general credence so long and so unsus- pectingly accorded to them. The list of old British kings given by Mr. Giles also deserves attention, as a parallel to the Grecian genealogies anterior to the Olympiads. 1 The following passage, from the Preface of Mr. Price to Warton's Hu- 07 of English Poetry, is alike just and forcibly characterized ; the whol
