Daukantas idealized and idolized the past. Virgil Krapauskas asserted that Daukantas' letters to Narbutt showed Daukantas to be a better scholar than his works – in the letters Daukantas emphasized the need for better methods of collecting, publishing and analyzing primary sources, though his works remained highly romantic and didactic. Daukantas spent considerable effort in tracking down various historical documents, but he believed that where historical records are missing, historians should use their imagination to fill in the gaps. If a source was favorable to Lithuania, he did not evaluate it critically and readily accepted a number of legends. For example, he elaborated on the theory that Lithuanians were descendants of Herules that he took from Albert Wijuk Kojałowicz (though he rejected the legend about Roman Palemonids), praised ancient democracy of Prussian king Widewuto, and used a loose translation of the short story "Żiwila" by Adam Mickiewicz. But he was critical of sources that portrayed Lithuania in a negative light. For example, he was one of the first to criticize the Teutonic account of the Battle of Strėva as a crushing defeat of Lithuanian forces or argue that the Lithuanian returned to the Battle of Grunwald and continued to fight. While Daukantas' scholarship was poor and does not stand up to modern standards, it was on par with his contemporaries.