03044cam a22003133u 450000100060000000300070000600500170001300600020003000700050003200800410003704000110007804100170008905000070010610000420011324500410015526400510019630000470024733600260029433700260032033800360034650000310038250801980041352018990061153400500251065300480256070000240260885600550263285600430268776228UtSlPG20260610134750.0mcr n260607r20251780utu|||||o|||||||||||||| d  aUtSlPG 7aen2iso639-1 4aPQ1 aFeijoo, Benito Jerónimo,d1676-176410aEssays, or discourses, vol. 3 (of 4) 1aSalt Lake City, UT :bProject Gutenberg,c2025  a1 online resource :bmultiple file formats  atextbtxt2rdacontent  acomputerbc2rdamedia  aonline resourcebcr2rdacarrier  aRelease date is 2025-06-05  aJosep Cols Canals and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)  a"Essays, or discourses, vol. 3 (of 4) :  Selected from the works of Feyjoo, and…." by Feyjoo is a collection of essays written in the late 18th century. This volume turns a sharp, skeptical eye on how history is written, weighing style against substance and probing the biases that distort the record. Its likely focus is on the art and ethics of historiography—how truth is pursued, how it goes astray, and how celebrated anecdotes harden into “common errors.”  At the start of this volume, the essayist argues that an excellent historian is rarer than a great poet, then surveys the celebrated ancients to show how even the best—Herodotus, Xenophon, Livy, Sallust, Tacitus—have been faulted for order, invention, speeches, and bias. He uses Quintus Curtius (as dismantled by Le Clerc) to illustrate how admired histories can be riddled with errors, then details the perils of style (affectation, false sublimity, uneven elevation), the difficulty of selecting essentials without confusion, and the constant tug‑of‑war between chronology and clear narrative. The core problem is truth: proximity to power, national and religious partisanship, hope and fear, personal grudges, and the temptation to embellish or to please the reader all warp accounts; forged chronicles and thin reading compound the damage. The essay closes the opening with a rapid catalogue of “popular errors” and doubtful tales—Helen never at Troy, Virgil’s Dido anachronism, the Cretan labyrinth likely a myth, Archimedes’ and Proclus’s burning mirrors unattested by reliable sources, French royal legends (Pharamond, Salic Law, holy oil and fleurs‑de‑lis) questioned, Belisarius’s beggary likely apocryphal, and Joan of Arc’s “inspiration” reframed as political stagecraft—modeling how to sift famous stories with critical restraint. (This is an automatically generated summary.)  pOriginally published:cLondon: H. Payne, 1780  aSpanish essays -- Translations into English1 aBrett, John,d-17854 uhttps://archive.org/details/essaysordiscours03feij40uhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76228