[An English critic and essayist, De Quincey used his own life as the subject of his best-known work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822), in which he chronicled his addiction to opium. He contributed reviews to a number of London journals and earned a reputation as an insightful if occasionally longwinded literary critic. At the time of De Quincey's death, his critical expertise was underestimated, though his talent as a prose writer had long been acknowledged. In the twentieth century, some critics still disdain the digressive qualities of De Quincey's writing, yet others find that his essays display an acute psychological awareness. In the following excerpt, De Quincey tries to rectify what he sees as a false and narrow view of Herodotus. He argues that Herodotus is much more than a historian and compares him to the French Encyclopedists, calling Herodotus "the first great parent of discovery. "]

Few, even amongst literary people, are aware of the true place occupied by Herodotus in universal literature; secondly, scarce here and there a scholar up and down a century is led to reflect upon the multiplicity of his relations to the whole range of civilization. We endeavour in these words to catch, as in a net, the gross prominent faults of his appreciation; on which account, first, we say pointedly, universal literature, not Grecian—since the primary error is, to regard Herodotus merely in relation to the literature of Greece; secondly, on which account we notice the circuit, the numerical amount; of his collisions with science—because the second and greater error is, to regard him exclusively as an historian. But now, under a juster allocation of his rank, as the general father of prose composition, Herodotus is nearly related to all literature whatsoever, modern not less than ancient; and as the father of what may be called ethnographical geography, as a man who speculated most ably on all the humanities of science—that is, on all the scientific questions which naturally interest our human sensibilities in this great temple which we look up to, the pavilion of the sky, the sun, the moon, the atmosphere, with its climates and its winds; or in this home which we inherit, the earth, with its hills and rivers—Herodotus ought least of all to be classed amongst historians: that is but a secondary title for him; he deserves to be rated as the leader amongst philosophical polyhistors, which is the nearest designation to that of encyclopædist current in the Greek literature. And yet is not this word encyclopœdist much lower than his ancient name—father of history? Doubtless it is no great distinction at present to be an encyclopædist, which is often but another name for bookmaker, craftsman, mechanic, journeyman, in his meanest degeneration; yet in those early days, when the timid muse of science had scarcely ventured sandal deep into waters so unfathomable, it seems to us a great thing indeed, that one young man should have founded an entire encyclopædia for his countrymen, upon those difficult problems which challenged their primary attention, because starting forward from the very roof—the walls— the floor of that beautiful theatre which they tenanted. The habitable world, was now … daily becoming better known to the human race; but how? Chiefly through Herodotus. There are amusing evidences extant, of the profound ignorance in which nations the most enlightened had hitherto lived, as to all lands beyond their own and its frontier adjacencies. But within the single generation (or the single half century) previous to the birth of Herodotus, vast changes had taken place. The mere revolutions consequent upon the foundation of the Persian empire had approximated the whole world of civilization. First came the conquest of Egypt by the second of the new emperors. This event, had it stood alone, was immeasurable in its effects for meeting curiosity, and in its immediate excitement for prompting it. It brought the whole vast chain of Persian dependencies, from the river Indus eastwards to the Nile westwards, or even through Cyrene to the gates of Carthage, under the unity of a single sceptre. The world was open. Jealous interdicts, inhospitable laws, national hostilities, always in procinctu, no longer fettered the feet of the merchant, or neutralized the exploring instincts of the philosophic traveller. Next came the restoration of the Jewish people. Judea, no longer weeping by the Euphrates, was again sitting for another half millennium of divine probation under her ancient palm-tree. Next after that came the convulsions of Greece, earthquake upon earthquake; the trampling myriads of Darius, but six years before the birth of Herodotus; the river-draining millions of Xerxes in the fifth year of his wondering infancy. Whilst the swell from this great storm was yet angry, and hardly subsiding, (a metaphor used by Herodotus himself,…) whilst the scars of Greece were yet raw from the Persian scymitar, her towns and temples to the east of the Corinthian isthmus smouldering ruins yet reeking from the Persian torch, the young Herodotus had wandered forth in a rapture of impassioned curiosity, to see, to touch, to measure, all those great objects, whose names had been recently so rife in men's mouths. The luxurious Sardis, the nation of Babylon, the Nile, the oldest of rivers, Memphis, and Thebes the hundred-gated, that were but amongst his youngest daughters, with the pyramids inscrutable as the heavens—all these he had visited. As far up the Nile as Elephantine he had personally pushed his enquiries; and far beyond that, by his obstinate questions from all men presumably equal to the answers. Tyre, even, he made a separate voyage to explore. Palestine he had trodden with Grecian feet; the mysterious Jerusalem he had visited, and had computed her proportions. Finally, as to Greece continental, thought not otherwise connected with it himself than by the bond of language, and as the home of his Ionian ancestors, (in which view he often calls it by the great moral name of Hellas, regions that geographically belong to Asia and even to Africa,) he seems by mere casual notices, now prompted by an historical incident, now for the purpose of an illustrative comparison, to have known so familiarly, that Pausanias in after ages does not describe more minutely the local features to which he had dedicated a life, than this extraordinary traveller, for whom they did but point a period or circumstantiate a parenthesis. As a geographer, often as a hydrographer—witness his soundings thirty miles off the mouths of the Nile—Herodotus was the first great parent of discovery, as between nation and nation he was the author of mutual revelation; whatsoever any one nation knew of its own little ring fence, through daily use and experience, or had received by ancestral tradition, that he published to all other nations. He was the first central interpreter, the common dragoman to the general college of civilization that now belted the Mediterranean, holding up, in a language already laying the foundations of universality, one comprehensive mirror, reflecting to them all the separate chorography, habits, institutions, and religious systems of each. Nor was it in the facts merely, that he retraced the portraits of all leading states; whatsoever in these facts was mysterious, for that he had a self-originated solution; whatsoever was perplexing by equiponderant counter-assumptions, for that he brought a determining impulse to the one side or the other; whatsoever seemed contradictory, for that he brought a reconciling hypothesis. Were it the annual rise of a river, were it the formation of a famous kingdom by alluvial depositions, were it the unexpected event of a battle, or the apparently capricious migration of a people—for all alike Herodotus had such resources of knowledge as took the sting out of the marvellous, or such resources of ability as at least suggested the plausible. Antiquities or mythology, martial institutions or pastoral, the secret motives to a falsehood which he exposes, or the hidden nature of some truth which he deciphers—all alike lay within the searching dissection of this astonishing intellect, the most powerful lens by far that has ever been brought to bear upon the mixed objects of a speculative traveller.

To have classed this man as a mere fabling annalist, or even if it should be said on better thoughts—no, not as a fabling annalist but as a great scenical historian—is so monstrous an oversight, so mere a neglect of the proportions maintained amongst the topics treated by Herodotus, that we do not conceive any apology requisite for revising, in this place or at this time, the general estimate on a subject always interesting. What is every body's business, the proverb instructs us to view as nobody's by duty; but under the same rule it is any body's by right; and what belongs to all hours alike, may for that reason belong without blame to January of the year 1842. Yet, if any man obstinate in demanding for all acts a "sufficient reason" to speak Leibniticé] demurs to our revision, as having no special invitation at this immediate moment, then we are happy to tell him that Mr Hermann Bobrik has furnished us with such an invitation by a recent review of Herodotus as a geographer, and thus furnished even a technical plea for calling up the great man before our bar.

We have already said something towards reconsidering the thoughtless classification of a writer whose works do actually, in their major proportion, not essentially concern that subject to which, by their translated title, they are exclusively referred; for even that part which is historical, often moves by mere anecdotes or personal sketches. And the uniform object of these is not the history, but the political condition, of the particular state or province. But we now feel disposed to press this rectification a little more keenly by asking—what was the reason for this apparently wilful error? The reason is palpable: it was the ignorance of irreflectiveness.

I. For with respect to the first oversight on the claim of Herodotus, as an earliest archetype of composition, so much is evident—that, if prose were simply the negation of verse, were it the fact that prose had no separate laws of its own, but that to be a composer in prose meant only his privilege of being inartificial—his dispensation from the restraints of metre—then indeed it would be a slight nominal honour to have been the Father of Prose. But this is ignorance, though a pretty common ignorance. To walk well, it is not enough that a man abstains from dancing. Walking has rules of its own, the more difficult to perceive or to practise as they are less broadly prononcés. To forbear singing is not therefore to speak well or to read well: each of which offices rests upon a separate art of its own. Numerous laws of transition, connexion, preparation, are different for a writer in verse and a writer in prose. Each mode of composition is a great art; well executed, is the highest and most difficult of arts. And we are satisfied that, one century before the age of Herodotus, the effort must have been greater to wean the feelings from a key of poetic composition to which all minds had long been attuned and prepared, than at present it would be for any paragraphist in the newspapers to make the inverse revolution by suddenly renouncing the modesty of prose for the impassioned forms of lyrical poetry. It was a great thing to be the leader of prose composition; great even, as we all can see at other times, to be absolutely first in any one subdivision of composition: how much more in one whole bisection of literature! And, if it is objected that Herodotus was not the eldest of prose writers, doubtless in an absolute sense no man was. There must always have been short public inscriptions not admitting of metre, as where numbers—quantities—dimensions were concerned. It is enough that all feeble tentative explorers of the art had been too meagre in matter, too rude in manner, like Fabius Pietor amongst the Romans, to captivate the ears of men, and thus to ensure their own propagation. Without annoying the reader by the cheap erudition of parading defunct names before him, it is certain that Seylax, an author still surviving, was nearly contemporary with Herodotus; and not very wide of him by his subject. In his case it is probable that the mere practical benefits of his book to the navigators of the Mediterranean in that early period, had multiplied his book so as eventually to preserve it. Yet, as Major Rennell remarks,… "Seylax must be regarded as a seaman or pilot, and the author of a coasting directory"; as a mechanic artizan, ranking with Hamilton, Moore, or Gunter, not as a great liberal artist—an intellectual potentate like Herodotus. Such now upon the scale of intellectual claims as was this geographical rival by comparison with Herodotus, such doubtless were his rivals or predecessors in history, in antiquities, and in the other provinces which he occupied. And generally the fragments of these authors, surviving in Pagan as well as Christian collections, show that they were such. So that, in a high virtual sense, Herodotus was to prose composition what Homer 600 years earlier had been to verse.

II. But whence arose the other mistake about Herodotus—the fancy that his great work was exclusively (or even chiefly) a history. It arose simply from a mistranslation, which subsists every where to this day. We remember that Kant, in one of his miscellaneous essays, finding a necessity for explaining the term Histoire, [why we cannot say, since the Germans have the self-grown word Geschichte for that idea,] deduces it of course from the Greek [Istoria] … This brings him to an occasion for defining the term. And how? It is laughable to imagine the anxious reader bending his ear to catch the Kantean whisper, and finally, solemnly hearing that [Istoria] … means—History. Really, Professor Kant, we should almost have guessed as much. But such derivations teach no more than the ample circuit of Bardolph's definition—"accommodated—that whereby a man is, or may be thought to be"— what? "accommodated. " Kant was an excellent Latin scholar, but an indifferent Grezian. And spite of the old traditional "Historiarum Libri No vem," which stands upon all Latin titlepages of Herodotus, we need scarcely remind a Greek scholar that . . the noun [Istoria], never … bears in this writer the latter sense of recording and memorializing. The substantive is a word frequently employed by Herodotus: often in the plural number; and uniformly it means enquiries or investigations, so that the proper English version of the titlepage would be—"Of the researches made by Herodotus, Nine Books." And in reality that is the very meaning, and the secret drift, the conservation running overhead through these nine sections to the nine muses. Had the work been designed as chiefly historical, it would have been placed under the patronage of the one sole muse presiding over History. But because the very opening sentence tells us that it is not chiefly historical, that it is so partially, that it rehearses the acts of men, … together with the monumental structures of human labour, … and other things beside, … because in short not any limited annals, because the mighty revelation of the world to its scattered inhabitants, … therefore it was that a running title or superscription so extensive and so aspiring had at some time been adopted. Every muse, and not one only, is presumed to be interested in the work; and, in simple truth, this legend of dedication is but an expansion or variety more impressively conveyed of what had been already notified in the inaugural sentence; whilst both this sentence and that dedication were designed to meet the very misconception which has since notwithstanding prevailed.

These rectifications ought to have some effect in elevating—first, the rank of Herodotus; secondly, his present attractions. Most certain we are that few readers are aware of the various amusement conveyed from all sources then existing, by this most splendid of travellers. Dr Johnson has expressed in print, (and not merely in the strife of conversation,) the following extravagant idea—that to Homer, as its original author, may be traced back, at least in outline, every tale or complication of incidents now moving in modern poems, romances, or novels. Now, it is not necessary to denounce such an assertion as false, because, upon two separate reasons, it shows itself to be impossible. In the first place, the motive to such an assertion was—to emblazon the inventive faculty of Homer; but it happens that Homer could not invent any thing, small or great, under the very principles of Grecian art. To be a fiction, as to matters of action, (for in embellishments the rule might be otherwise,) was to be ridiculous and unmeaning in Grecian eyes. We may illustrate the Grecian feeling on this point (however little known to critics) by our own dolorous disappointment when we opened the Alhambra of Mr Washington Irving. We had supposed it to be some real Spanish or Moorish legend connected with that romantic edifice; and, behold! it was a mere Sadler's Wells travesty, (we speak of its plan, not of its execution,) applied to some slender fragments from past days. Such, but far stronger, would have been the disappointment to Grecian feelings, in finding any poetic (à fortiori, any prose) legend to be a fiction of the writer's—words cannot measure the reaction of disgust. And thence it was that no tragic poet of Athens ever took for his theme any tale or fable not already pre existing in some version, though now and then it might be the least popular version. It was capital as an offence of the intellect, it was lunatic to do otherwise. This is a most important characteristic of ancient taste; and most interesting in its philosophic value for any comparative estimate of modern art, as against ancient. In particular, no just commentary can ever be written on the poeties of Aristotle, which leaves it out of sight. Secondly, it is evident that the whole character, the very principle of movement, in many modern stories, depends upon sentiments derived remotely from Christianity; and others upon usages or manners peculiar to modern civilization; so as in either case to involve a moral anachronism if viewed as Pagan. Not the colouring only of the fable, but the very incidents, one and all, and the situations, and the perplexities, are constantly the product of something characteristically modern in the circumstances, sometimes for instance in the climate; for the ancients had no experimental knowledge of severe climates. With these double impossibilities before us, of any absolute fictions in a Pagan author that could be generally fitted to anticipate modern tales, we shall not transfer to Herodotus the impracticable compliment paid by Dr Johnson to Homer. But it is certain that the very best collection of stories furnished by Pagan funds, lies dispersed through his great work. One of the best of the Arabian Nights, the very best as regards the structure of the plot—viz. the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves—is evidently derived from an incident in that remarkable Egyptian legend, connected with the treasure house of Rhampsinitus. This, except two of his Persian legends, (Cyrus and Darius,) is the longest tale in Herodotus; and by much the best in an artist's sense, indeed, its own remarkable merit, as a fable in which the incidents successively generate each other, caused it to be transplanted by the Greeks to their own country. Vossius, in his work on the Greek historians, and a hundred years later, Valekenaer, with many other scholars, had pointed out the singular conformity of this memorable Egyptian story with several that afterwards circulated in Greece. The eldest of these transfers was undoubtedly the Baeotian tale (but in cays before the name Bæotia existed) of Agamedes and Trophonius, architects, and sons to the King of Orehomenos, who built a treasurehouse at Hyria, (noticed by Homer in his ship catalogue,) followed by tragical circumstances, the very same as those recorded by Herodotus. It is true that the latter incidents, according to the Egyptian version—the monstrous device of Rhampsinitus for discovering the robber at the price of his daughter's honour, and the final reward of the robber for his petty ingenuity, (which, after all, belonged chiefly to the deceased architect,) ruin the tale as a whole. But these latter incidents are obviously forgeries of another age; "angeschlossen" fastened on by fraud, "an den ersten aelteren theil, " to the first and elder part, as Mueller rightly observes, … of his Orehomenos. And even here it is pleasing to notice the incredulity of Herodotus, who was not, like so many of his Christian commentators, sceptical upon previous system and by wholesale, but equally prone to believe wherever his heart (naturally reverential) suggested an interference of superior natures, and to doubt wherever his excellent judgment detected marks of incoherency. He records the entire series of incidents as … reports of events which had reached him by hearsay, … "but to me," he says pointedly, "not credible."

In this view, as a thesaurus fabularum, a great repository of anecdotes and legends, tragic or romantic, Herodotus is so far beyond all Pagan competition, that we are thrown upon Christian literatures for any corresponding form of merit. The case has often been imagined playfully, that a man were restricted to one book; and, supposing all books so solemn as those of a religious interest to be laid out of the question, many are the answers which have been pronounced, according to the difference of men's minds. Rousseau, as is well known, on such an assumption made his election for Plutarch. But shall we tell the reader why? It was not altogether his taste, or his judicious choice, which decided him; for choice there can be none amongst elements unexamined—it was his limited reading. Except a few papers in the French Encyclopédie during his maturer years, and some dozen of works presented to him by their authors, his own friends, Rousseau had read little or nothing beyond Plutarch's Lives in a bad French translation, and Montaigne. Though not a Frenchman, having had an education if such one can call it) thoroughly French, he had the usual puerile French craze about Roman virtue, and republican simplicity, and Cato, and "all that." So that his decision goes for little. And even he, had he read Herodotus, would have thought twice before he made up his mind.

The truth is, that in such a case, suppose, for example, Robinson Crusoe empowered to import one book and no more into his insular hermitage, the most powerful of human books must be unavoidably excluded, and for the following reason: that in the direct ratio of its profundity will be the unity of any fictitious interest; a Paradise Lost, or a King Lear, could not agitate or possess the mind as they do, if they were at leisure to "amuse" us. So far from relying on its unity, the work which should aim at the maximum of amusement, ought to rely on the maximum of variety. And in that view it is that we urge the paramount pretensions of Herodotus; since not only are his topics separately of primary interest, each for itself, but they are collectively the most varied in the quality of that interest, and they are touched with the most flying and least lingering pen; for, of all writers, Herodotus is the most cautious not to trespass on his reader's patience: his transitions are the most fluent whilst they are the most endless, justifying themselves to the understanding as much as they recommend themselves to the spirit of hurrying curiosity; and his narrations or descriptions are the most animated by the generality of their abstractions, whilst they are the most faithfully individual by the felicity of their minute circumstances.

Once, and in a public situation, we ourselves denominated Herodotus the Froissait of antiquity. But we were then speaking of him exclusively as an historian; and even so, we did him injustice. Thus far it is true the two men agree, that both are less political, or reflecting, or moralizing, as historians, than they are scenical and splendidly picturesque. But Froissart is little else than an historian. Whereas Herodotus is the counterpart of some ideal Pandora, by the universality of his accomplishments. He is a traveller of discovery, like Captain Cooke or Park. He is a naturalist, the earliest that existed. He is a mythologist, and a speculator on the origin, as well as value, of religious rites. He is a political economist by instinct of genius, before the science of economy had a name or a conscious function; and by two great records, he has put us up to the level of all that can excite our curiosity at that great era of moving civilization:—first, as respects Persia, by the elaborate review of the various satrapies or great lieutenancies of the empire—that vast empire which had absorbed the Assyrian, Median, Babylonian, Little Syrian, and Egyptian kingdoms, registering against each separate viceroyalty, from Algiers to Lahore beyond the Indus, what was the amount of its annual tribute to the gorgeous exchequer of Susa; and secondly, as respects Greece, by his review of the numerous little Grecian states, and their several contingents in ships, or in soldiers, or in both, (according as their position happened to be inland or maritime,) towards the universal armament against the second and greatest of the Persian invasions. Two such documents, such archives of political economy, do not exist elsewhere in history. Egypt had now ceased, and we may say that (according to the Scriptural prophecy) it had ceased for ever to be an independent realm. Persia had now for seventy years had her foot upon the neck of this unhappy land; and, in one century beyond the death of Herodotus, the two-horned hegoat of Macedon was destined to butt it down into hopeless prostration. But so far as Egypt, from her vast antiquity, or from her great resources, was entitled to a more circumstantial notice than any other satrapy of the great empire, such a notice it has; and we do not scruple to say, though it may seem a bold word, that, from the many scattered features of Egyptian habits or usages incidentally indicated by Herodotus, a better portrait of Egyptian life, and a better abstract of Egyptian political economy, might even yet be gathered, than from all the writers of Greece for the cities of their native land.

But take him as an exploratory traveller and as a naturalist, who had to break ground for the earliest entrenchments in these new functions of knowledge; we do not scruple to say that, mutatis mutandis, and concessis concedendis, Herodotus has the separate qualifications of the two men whom we would select by preference as the most distinguished amongst Christian traveller-naturalists; he has the universality of the Prussian Humboldt; and he has the picturesque fidelity to nature of the English Dampier—of whom the last was a simple self-educated seaman, but strong-minded by nature, austerely accurate through his moral reverence for truth, and zealous in pursuit of knowledge, to an excess which raises him to a level with the noble Greek. Dampier, when in the last stage of exhaustion from a malignant dysentery, unable to stand upright, and surrounded by perils in a land of infidel fanatics, crawled on his hands and feet to verify some fact of natural history, under the blazing forenoon of the tropics; and Herodotus, having no motive but his own inexhaustible thirst of knowledge, embarked on a separate voyage, fraught with hardships, towards a chance of clearing up what seemed a difficulty of some importance in deducing the religious mythology of his country.

But it is in those characters by which he is best known to the world—viz. as an historian and a geographer— that Herodotus levies the heaviest tribute on our reverence; and precisely in those characters it is that he now claims the amplest atonement, having formerly sustained the grossest outrages of insult and slander on the peculiar merits attached to each of those characters. Credulous he was supposed to be, in a degree transcending the privilege of old garrulous nurses; hyperbolically extravagant beyond Sir John Mandeville; and lastly, as if he had been a Mendez Pinto or a Munchausen, he was saluted as the "father of lies." Now, on these calumnies, it is pleasant to know that his most fervent admirer no longer feels it requisite to utter one word in the way of complaint or vindication. Time has carried him round to the diametrical counter-pole of estimation. Examination and more learned study have justified every iota of those statements to which he pledged his own private authority. His chronology is better to this day than any single system opposed to it. His dimensions and distances are so far superior to those of later travellers, whose hands were strengthened by all the powers of military command and regal autocracy, that Major Rennell, upon a deliberate retrospect of his works, preferred his authority to that of those who came after him as conquerors and rulers of the kingdoms which he had described as a simple traveller; nay, to the late authority of those who had conquered those conquerors. It is gratifying that a judge, so just and thoughtful as the Major, should declare the reports of Alexander's officers on the distances and stations in the Asiatic part of his empire, less trustworthy by much than the reports of Herodotus: yet, who was more liberally devoted to science than Alexander? or what were the humble powers of the foot traveller in comparison with those of the mighty earthshaker, for whom prophecy had been on the watch for centuries? It is gratifying, that a judge like the Major should find the same advantage on the side of Herodotus, as to the distances in the Egyptian and Lybian part of this empire, on a comparison with the most accomplished of Romans, Pliny, Strabo, Ptolemy, (for all are Romans who benefited by any Roman machinery,) coming five and six centuries later. We indeed hold the accuracy of Herodotus to be all but marvellous, considering the wretched apparatus which he could then command in the popular measures. The stadium, it is true, was more accurate, because less equivocal in those Grecian days, than afterwards, when it inter-oscillated with the Roman stadium; but all the multiples of that stadium, such as the schœnus, the Persian parasang, or the military stathmus, were only less vague than the coss of Hindostan in their ideal standards, and as fluctuating practically as are all computed distances at all times and places. The close approximations of Herodotus to the returns of distances upon caravan routes of 500 miles by the most vigilant of modern travellers, checked by the caravan controllers, is a bitter retort upon his calumniators. And, as to the consummation of the insults against him in the charge of wilful falsehood, we explain it out of hasty reading and slight acquaintance with Greek. The sensibility of Herodotus to his own future character in this respect, under a deep consciousness of his upright forbearance on the one side, and of the extreme liability on the other side to uncharitable construction for any man moving amongst Egyptian thaumaturgical traditions, comes forward continually in his anxious distinctions between what he gives on his own ocular experience … what upon his own enquiries, or combination of enquiries with previous knowledge … —what upon hear-say … —what upon current tradition .… And the evidences are multiplied over and above these distinctions, of the irritation which besieged his mind as to the future wrongs he might sustain from the careless and the unprincipled. Had truth been less precious in his eyes, was it tolerable to be supposed a liar for so vulgar an object as that of creating a stare by wonder-making? The high-minded Grecian, justly proud of his superb intellectual resources for taking captive the imaginations of his half-polished countrymen, disdained such base artifices, which belong more properly to an effeminate and over-stimulated stage of civilization. And, once for all, he had announced at an early point as the principle of his work, as what ran along the whole line of his statements by way of basis or subsumption … that he wrote upon the faith of hearsay from the Egyptians severally: meaning by "severally," … —that he did not adopt any chance hearsay, but such as was guaranteed by the men who presided over each several department of Egyptian official or ceremonial life.…