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For the most part, these enormous, foolish, ill-motived accretions are honest enough in their actual references, for the greater part of our modern historians who use them are so incapable of judgment and so lacking in style, so averse from what Rossetti called "fundamental brain-work," that they have not the power to do more than shovel all their notes on you in a lump and call it history. But now and then this temptation to humbug produces its natural result, and the references are false.

The late Mr. Andrew Lang used to say that the writer who writes under the pseudonym of "Anatole France" must have had his footnotes for his Life of Joan of Arc done by contract. The idea opens up a wide horizon. A man of name would sit down to write a general history of something of which he had a smattering, and would then turn it over to a poor man who would hack for him in the British Museum and find references—and they could always be found—for pretty well any statement he had chosen to make.

At any rate, in this particular case of Anatole France's Joan of Arc, Andrew Lang amply proved that the writer had never read his original authorities, though he quoted them in heaps.