in groping our way through the darker and more perplexed passages of the
story.

The obscurity which hangs over the period has not been dispelled by those
modern writers, who, like Varillas, in his well-known work, _Politique
de Ferdinand le Catholique_, affect to treat the subject philosophically,
paying less attention to facts than to their causes and consequences.
These ingenious persons, seldom willing to take things as they find them,
seem to think that truth is only to be reached by delving deep below the
surface. In this search after more profound causes of action, they reject
whatever is natural and obvious. They are inexhaustible in conjectures and
fine-spun conclusions, inferring quite as much from what is not said or
done, as from what is. In short, they put the reader as completely in
possession of their hero's thoughts on all occasions, as any professed
romance-writer would venture to do. All this may be very agreeable, and,
to persons of easy faith, very satisfactory; but it is not history and may
well remind us of the astonishment somewhere expressed by Cardinal de Retz
at the assurance of those who, at a distance from the scene of action,
pretended to lay open all the secret springs of policy, of which he
himself, though a principal party, was ignorant.

No prince, on the whole, has suffered more from these unwarrantable
liberties than Ferdinand the Catholic. His reputation for shrewd policy
suggests a ready key to whatever is mysterious and otherwise inexplicable
in his government; while it puts writers like Gaillard and Varillas
constantly on the scent after the most secret and subtile sources of
action, as if there were always something more to be detected than readily
meets the eye. Instead of judging him by the general rules of human
conduct, everything is referred to deep-laid stratagem; no allowance is
made for the ordinary disturbing forces, the passions and casualties of