Essays, or Discourses, Vol. 3 (of 4): Selected from the Works of Feyjoo, and Translated from the Spanish

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.