But his mind was utterly wanting in the faculty by which a demonstrated truth is distinguished from a plausible supposition.

He is not content with suggesting that an event may have happened.

He is certain that it happened, and calls on the reader to be certain too, (though not a trace of it exists in any record whatever,) because it would solve the phenomena so neatly.

Just read over again, if you have forgotten it, the conjectural restoration of the Inscription in page 126 of the second volume; and then, on your honour as a scholar and a man of sense, tell me whether in Bentley's edition of Milton there is anything which approaches to the audacity of that emendation.

Niebuhr requires you to believe that some of the greatest men in Rome were burned alive in the Circus; that this event was commemorated by an inscription on a monument, one half of which is sill in existence; but that no Roman historian knew anything about it; and that all tradition of the event was lost, though the memory of anterior events much less important has reached our time.