For
instance, Pere Menestrier thinks that the Scoras mentioned by
Polybius is the Saona; Letronne, Larauza and Schweighauser think
it is the Isere; Cochard, a learned Lyonnais, calls it the Drome,
and for all who have eyes to see there are between Scoras and
Scrivia great geographical and linguistical resemblances,--to say
nothing of the probability, amounting almost to certainty, that
the Carthaginian fleet was moored in the Gulf of Spezzia or the
roadstead of Genoa. I could understand these patient researches if
there were any doubt as to the battle of Canna; but inasmuch as
the results of that great battle are known, why blacken paper with
all these suppositions (which are, as it were, the arabesques of
hypothesis) while the history most important to the present day,
that of the Reformation, is full of such obscurities that we are
ignorant of the real name of the man who navigated a vessel by
steam to Barcelona at the period when Luther and Calvin were
inaugurating the insurrection of thought.[*]
You and I hold, I think, the same opinion, after having made, each
in his own way, close researches as to the grand and splendid
figure of Catherine de' Medici.
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