Tradition may well be named the eldest daughter of Time, and
nursing-mother of the Muses--the fruitful parent of that very learning
which would, in the cruel spirit of its pedantry and malice, make her
the sacrifice while it lays claim to the inheritance. What is learning
but a laborious, often ill-drawn, and almost invariably partial
deduction from facts which tradition has first collected? When we
consider in whose hands learning has been, almost ever since its
creation; the uses which have been made of it by priests and
politicians; by poets, orators, and flatterers; by controversialists and
designing historians;--how commonly has it been perverted to abuse the
very senses of mankind, and to give a bias to their thoughts and
feelings, only to mislead and to betray! Let the evidence be well
compared, and a view taken of the respective amounts of doubt and
certainty which appertain to human history as it appears in written
records; and it will be seen that, to verify any given fact, so as to
prevent the possibility of doubt, we must throw aside our reverence for
the scholar's pen and the midnight lamp, which seem, like the faculty of
speech, only given to men, as the witty Frenchman observed, "to conceal
their thoughts.
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