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presuming upon his own claims to attention as a resident for seventeen years at the court of the great king. Professing to draw his relation of Oriental affairs from a laborious examination of the Persian archives, he proceeded to contradict, wherever he could do so without fear of detection, the assertions of his rival; and he thus acquired to himself a degree of fame and of consideration to which his literary merits would certainly never have entitled him, and which the course of detraction he pursued could alone have enabled him to gain. By the most unblushing effrontery he succeeded in palming of his narrative upon the ancient world as the true and genuine account of the transactions, and his authority was commonly followed in preference to that of Herodotus, at least upon all points of purely Oriental history."

Now regarding Ctesias, the same writer observes:—'There were not wanting indeed in ancient time some more critical spirits, e.g. Aristotle and the true Plutarch, who refused to accept as indisputable the statements of the Cnidian physi-