It remains for us after our own fashion to pay some such homage to Pisano.
The chief difficulty with which the student of early art and literature has to deal, is the insufficiency of positive information.

Instead of accurate dates and well-established facts he finds a legend, rich apparently in detail, but liable at every point to doubt, and subject to attack by plausible conjecture.

In the absence of contemporary documents and other trustworthy sources of instruction, he is tempted to substitute his own hypotheses for tradition and to reconstruct the faulty outlines of forgotten history according to his own ideas of fitness.

The Germans have been our masters in this species of destructive, dubitative, restorative criticism; and it is undoubtedly flattering to the historian's vanity to constitute himself a judge and arbiter in cases where tact and ingenuity may claim to sift the scattered fragment of confused narration.

Yet to resist this temptation is in many cases a plain and simple duty.
Tradition, when not positively disproved, should be allowed to have its full value; and a sounder historic sense is exercised in adopting its testimony with due caution, than in recklessly rejecting it and substituting guesses which the lack of knowledge renders unsubstantial.
Tradition may err about dates, details, and names.