Excerpt from Personal Characteristics From French History The authenticity of the sayings that have reached us from the earlier epochs has, as a matter of course, been impugned. In these days when our most cherished historical beliefs are subjected to incredulous analysis and unspar ing criticism, when Tiberius is proclaimed a martyr, Bacon is asserted to have written Shake speare's plays, and Newton declared to have dis covered the law of gravitation without the descent on his brow of the famous apple, it is not, per haps, surprising that stories handed down to us from a dim and distant past should meet with irreverent doubt. That the not too conscien tious chronicler may have introduced some improvement of form in order to impart an additional piquancy to a saying, or that the historian has turned a happy idea, clumsily expressed, into a compact phrase, may be re garded as possible, or even probable, in many cases. But there need be no great scruple about accepting such phrases, and it may be taken that if the wording has been improved the sense of the original reply remains. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.