[Endnote 013] Here we find the most learned Father of the Church using "volumen" in an unusual acceptation, not as a whole work, nor a part of a literary composition rolled into a scroll among the ancients, or separately bound among ourselves, but a division of a subject in the same "volume," just as Cornelius Nepos, once, and once only,—in his Life of Atticus (16),—speaks of the sixteen "books" of Letters which Cicero addressed to Atticus: "SexdecimvoluminaEpistolarum … ad Atticum missarum"; yet three or four "books" must have formed a "volumen," when we find Ovid, in his "Tristia" (III. 14, 19) speaking of the "five volumes" that contained his Metamorphoses:—
"Sunt quoque mutatae per quinque volumina formae;"
as the Metamorphoses were divided into fifteen books, three then formed a "volumen."—I cannot avoid calling attention to the curiously incorrect phrase, "voluminibus exaravit." An ancient, speaking of the "volumen," or scroll, would have used "scribere," —"exarare," possibly, when speaking of the "codicillus," or little wooden table made of wax, which he sent as a note or billet-doux to a friend or sweetheart, the figurative verb being applicable to the stylus "ploughing" letters "out" of the wax. The passage, from this blunder alone, seems to be an interpolation, where the forger ridiculously overshoots his mark: he out-Jeromes Jerome; for he makes the saint write bad Latin from a motive that never led St. Jerome astray,—a desire to be poetic. It is strange, too, for the passage to have come from the most learned of the Latin fathers with the loose expression, "post Augustum," to denote a history that began with Galba; and when Tacitus, who confined his attention to affairs of state (to the utter disregard of biographical details of the emperors), is spoken of as writing "Vitas Caesarum." However, the man who made the interpolation knew all that he wanted to accomplish, and would have been eminently successful in his crafty and knavish design, had he only known Latin well enough to have made St. Jerome write it as a bishop would have written it in the fourth century.
[Endnote 019] Nevertheless, Tacitus is uncommonly provoking to believers,—in his version, for example, of what is solemnly recorded in the xviith chapter of Exodus and the xxth of Numbers about the Israelites, when, in their wanderings, they murmured for want of water, and the Lord instructed Moses to "take the rod with which he smote" the waters of the Red Sea: the sacred penman proceeds: "And Moses took the rod from before the Lord, as he commanded him: And Moses and Aaron gathered the congregation together before the rock, and he said unto them, 'Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock?' And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank and their beasts also." (Numbers xx. 9-11). This incident, opposed to the laws of nature, Tacitus shews happened according to the constituted course of things, and makes the miracle ridiculous by introducing asses as the principal performers: he has been speaking of the Jews, ignorant of all the parts through which they were to pass, setting forth on a journey for which they had made no provision; "but nothing distressed them so much," he continues, "as want of water; and they were lying all over the plains, not far from the point of death, when a herd of wild asses quitted the pasture for a rock overgrown with copse and brushwood: Moses followed, and found, as he had conjectured from the spot being covered with verdure, abundant springs of water." "Omnium ignari, fortuitum iter incipiunt: sed nihil aeque quam inopia aquae fatigabat: jamque haud procul exitio, totis campis procubuerant, cum grex asinorum agrestium e pastu in rupem nemore opacam concessit: secutus Moses, conjectura herbidi soli, largas aquarum venas aperit." (Hist. v. 3). Tacitus is infinitely more offensive, and, certainly, most untruthful, when he says that the Jews "kept for worship in their holy of holies the image of an ass, as the animal by whose guidance they had slaked their thirst and brought their wanderings to a happy sequel": "effigiem animalis, quo monstrante errorem sitimque depulerant, penetrali sacravere." (Hist. v. 4)
[Endnote 074] This, I take it, is what the author of the Annals means. "Tibicen" was, of course, not a violin, but species of pipe among the ancients; the Egyptians were not famous for their performances upon this instrument, if they were acquainted with the "tibicen" at all. The question then arises,—Was the author of the Annals cognizant of the existence of such people as "Gipsies"? The last part of the Annals (where, it will be seen, this passage occurs,) was forged after the first quarter of the fifteenth century; was this nomad horde in Europe at that time? If there be one established fact it is that the "Gipsies" (then called "Aegyptiani") came into Europe at the commencement of the fifteenth century in the reign of the Emperor Sigismund. Martin Zeiller in his "Topographia Hassiae" says they were first caught sight of in Hesse in 1414, which is four years earlier than all historians fix the date of their advent into Germany, from following Jacob Thomasius, who makes that statement in the 16th and 17th sections of his "Disputatio de Cingaris." Two years after their arrival in Germany, (that is 1416, according to Zeiller, but 1420, according to Thomasius and the historians,) this curious people, separating into several bands, found their way into Italy. Here they may have attracted the attention of the author of the Annals, as well as in his frequent visits to Germany and the principality of Hesse. In fact, they attracted universal attention by their sporadic habitations, their nomadic lives, their wandering and dwelling, like the Thespians of old, in waggons, their shabby and ragged clothes, yet the heaps of gold and silver they had with them, their trains of horses, mules and asses, their love of music (to this day they are great experts with the violin), their favourite practice of fortune-telling, magic, palmistry, and those arts of sorcery, of which we hear so much in the Annals, the author of which must have been further impressed with their giving out that, though heathens coming from Lower Egypt, they wanted to embrace the Christian faith. This vagabond people had at their head a "king," whom the chroniclers style a "noble Count,"—as Martin Cursius in his Annals of Swabia (sub A.D. 1453): "obiit nobilis Comes Petrus de Minori Egypto, in die Philippi et Jacobi Apostolorum." "Peter" was preceded on the gipsy throne by "Panuel," who, styled also "nobilis Comes" by the chroniclers, died in 1445, his immediate predecessor being "Michael," under whom the immigration into Europe was effected of these "Egyptian" wanderers numbering 14,000 men, women and children.
[Endnote 081] I am indebted for nearly the whole of this to Niebuhr's Essay in the "Rheinisches Museum" on "The Difference between Annals and History." But in saying that Aulus Gellius attempting to solve the same problem showed "more learning than thought," Niebuhr did not know how easy it was to retaliate upon him by saying that in his own investigation he exhibited "more thought than learning" from supposing that a writer in the time of Marcus Antoninus might have had his inquiry suggested to him by Tacitus's "History" and "Annals," when, down to the fifteenth century, as we have shown, one common title, "Imperial History" ("Augusta Historia,") covered the historical productions of Tacitus, now known as "Annales" and "Historiae."
[Endnote 083] No overstatement but a fact. There are only 14 paragraphs in the Life and 8 letters, namely:—1. A letter from the Emperor Verus to Marcus Aurelius (§ 1); 2. Marcus Aurelius's Reply (§ 2); 3. A letter from Marcus Aurelius to his prefect (§ 5); 4. The prefect's reply (ibid); 5. A letter from Marcus Aurelius to Faustina (§ 9); 6. From Faustina to Marcus Aurelius (§ 10); 7. Marcus Aurelius's Answer (§ 11); and 8. A letter from Avidius Cassius to his son-in-law (§ 14); which ends the Life and enables the biographer to observe that "that letter showed what a stern and cruel emperor Avidius Cassius must have been": "haec epistola ejus indicat, quam severus et quam tristis futurus fuerit imperator."
[Endnote 136] The name of Emmanuel Chrysolaras must ever be associated with the revival of the Greek language in Western Europe after the study of it had been discontinued since the close of the eighth century, or for six hundred years. One of the earliest pupils of Chrysolaras, Leonardi Bruni, speaks of him in terms of warm admiration in his interesting "Memoirs of Occurrences in Italy during his Time" ("Rerum suo Tempore in Italia Gestarum Commentarius"). Bruni says that Chrysolaras was "the only and sole Professor of Greek, and that if he had been lost sight of, there was no one afterwards who could have taught that tongue": "hic autem unus solusque Literarum Graecarum Doctor, si e conspectu se auferet, a quo postmodum ediscas, nemo reperietur" (Muratori XIX. 920). Chrysolaras was a native of Constantinople, and member of a noble family; the way in which his country was assailed by Bayazid, Sultan of the Turks, and threatened by Tamerlane, Sultan of Samarcand, caused him to leave home, assured, as he was, of the certain downfall of the Byzantine Empire; first he went to Venice, which he reached by sea; while he was there teaching the Greek language his reputation spread to Florence, the inhabitants of which, making him the offer of a public salary, pressed him to come to their city, to teach their young men, numbers of whom were desirous of making themselves masters of his native tongue. It was in the year 1399 when Chrysolaras, thus settling in Florence, revived the study of the Greek language, and thereby gave a new and wonderful impulse to literature, first throughout Italy, and then Spain, Portugal, France, and the other countries of Europe.
[Endnote 145] The letter, from which this extract is made, will be found in Bracciolini's works (Pog. Op. pp. 301-5), as well as in the collection of his Epistles, (of which we have the first volume only,) by the Chevalier de' Tonelli (pp. 11-20);—should the reader be fond of literary curiosities he will also find it reproduced, as if it were his own composition, by Reduxis de Quero in his "Chronicle of Trevigo,"—"Chronicon Tarvisinum,"— preserved in Muratori's Rerum Italicarum Scriptores (tom. XIX. 829-33). As Bracciolini wrote to his friend Leonardo Bruni, Reduxis de Quero, not venturing to alter a word of what he pilfered, for fear of spoiling his pillage, takes his reader into his confidence and affectionately addresses him in the second person, while pretending, to have the exclusive information and personal recollections of Bracciolini, who, present at the Council of Constance, as a member of the court of John XXIII., witnessed the whole of the trial, defence and death of Jerome of Prague. Muratori, in exposing the plagiarism, is surprised at the impudence of Reduxis stating that, at the time he wrote the account, he was enjoying some leisure moments as Castellan of the "great Castle of Brescia":—"nihil enim agens,dum custodiae vacarem Castri magni Brixiae, aliquid agere," &c. The narrative of Bracciolini, light and airy, yet withal touching and graphic, has a wonderful effect in the "Chronicon Tarvisinum": it's not unlike sunlight breaking in and brightly shining between banks of fog. It was, therefore, necessary that a cause should be given for this supreme gleaming amid the general mists of the dull and heavy Chronicle of de Quero; Muratori, accordingly, very properly dispels the wonder of the reader by informing him that he is "here listening to Poggio writing, and in a style," he adds, "which Reduxis was about the last man to imitate":—"itaque heic audis Poggium scribentem, et quidem stylo, quem aequare Redusius minime gentium poterat."
[Endnote 208] Father Hardouin, however, is outrageously extravagant. He will admit that only two Greek authors and four Latin ones —Cicero, Pliny the Elder, (a big part of) Horace (the Satires and Epistles), and (a little bit of) Virgil (the Georgics), have come down to us, along with the sacred writings of the Old and New Testaments. Nothing else is genuine that we have from antiquity,—not even the coins,—certainly, not the productions of the Greek and Latin Fathers of the Church, nor the Ecumenical Councils down to that held at Trent, and to cap the climax of these appalling paradoxes, the parables and prophecies of the Saviour and the Apostles first appeared in Latin. More wondrous still! This wholesale fabrication all occurred in the 13th century, and the forgers were exclusively Benedictine monks. Had the great Jesuit confined his playful erudition to profane people all would have been well with him; but as he trenched upon holy ground in the skittishness of his scepticism the ecclesiastical authorities set over him were bound to interfere: his superiors severely reprimanded him, his promotion in the Church was for ever after stopped, and the supreme French law court,—the Parlement de Paris,—suppressed the book containing the novel raciness:—"Chronologiae ex Nummis Antiquis Restitutae Prolusio de Nummis Herodiadum":—but wedded to his opinions, and stubborn in the maintenance of them, Hardouin reproduced the least reprehensible in his "Ad Censuram Scriptorum Veterum Prologomena." From the manner in which he has been replied to by scholars all over Europe, especially in Holland, France and Germany, conspicuous among whom for pith of argument stand Basnage, Leclerc, Lacroze, Ittig and Bierling, nobody at the present day considers that what he said about the monuments of antiquity is worthy of the slightest attention, though everybody acknowledges his wonderful memory, sagacity, ingenuity, and mastery of all kinds of literature, especially history and chronology, and, above all, theology, of which he was a professor.
[Endnote 231] This I borrow from the Rev. Thomas Hunter, Vicar of Wrexham in the middle of the last century, and author of a book on Tacitus, from which I take the idea in the text. Hunter meant his work to be at once a philological and historical disquisition and a psychological and ethical analysis: he wrote it evidently from being thoroughly disgusted by what he had read in the Annals—(as well he might be);—and he laboured hard but in vain to show that the same faults which he found in that work he detected also in the History. His dissertation ends with a parallel between Livy and Tacitus, drawn expressly to disparage the latter, when every judicious, unbiassed reader who will form his opinion of Tacitus solely from the narrative, maxims, and sentiments met with in his History, must freely admit that he stands on a par with (to the thinking of many, above) Livy as an historian, a moralist and a man, all of which is denied by the ingenious Denbighshire clergyman. By a sort of intuitive knowledge,—or that mental process, known as the evolution of inner consciousness,—the world has long arrived at the conclusion that the Vicar of Wrexham's production is not valuable as a literary venture that aims at imparting truth: accordingly, his small 8vo. of 1752 labelled "Observations on Tacitus" shares the fate of the vast majority of modern volumes—it rests in peace buried in dust upon bookshelves.
[Endnote 251] I know that Hallam says in one of his great books ("Literature of Europe") that nobody now living believes in the authenticity of the Rowley Poems: but poetry was not the forte of Henry Hallam. I am also aware that, towards the close of the last century, a long and heated controversy raged for years among literary men, who may be divided into two distinct classes,— Believers in the Natural,—as Mr. Jacob Bryant, Dr. Jeremiah Milles, the Dean of Exeter, Dr. Langhorne, and Dr. Glynne,—and Believers in the Cock Lane Ghost and the Supernatural as Dr. Johnson, and the Mysterious and Impossible, as Lord Camden and Horace Walpole; and that the world has denied its assent to the theory of the first set who maintained that the poems were Rowley's, agreeing with the other set that they were Chatterton's, who, in consequence of his tender years and ignorance, was placed, for inspiration and intuitive knowledge, on a higher pedestal than Jeremiah. The position of the controversialists which has been accepted amounts to this:—that a child at the age of twelve years wrote the pastoral "Elinoure and Juga," which is marked by finer pathos than anything that proceeded from the passionate soul of Burns: that when a few months or so older this child wrote "Aella," which displays an energy equal, if not superior to Spencer's, and about the same time the "Tournament," which breathes the spirit of the middle ages more intensely than the Ivanhoe of Sir Walter Scott. Marvellous as all this is, it is found to be nearly a trifle by the side of this:—that the infant prodigy, when a lad in his eighteenth year, composed poetry that is not in accord with an improved information, but is a very deteriorated sort of stuff,—a reproduction of old fancies, too, in no new form,—as, to test it anywhere,—I take at random the opening lines of the "Invitation," as good as anything in "Kew Gardens," "Sly Dick," "Fanny of the Hill," or any other piece composed by Chatterton towards the close of his life:
"O God! whose thunder shakes the sky,Whose eye this atom globe surveys,To thee, my only rock, I fly,Thy mercy in thy justice praise.
The mystic mazes of thy will,The shadows of celestial," &c.:
as good as Tate and Brady, to be sure,—but verses so common-place in ideas and so prosaic in expression—that any youth in the sixth form at Eton or Winchester College would be ashamed to produce them as a school exercise. Everything that is marvellous has its history as well as everything that is comprehensible; and the story of the poems is as follows:—A bridge at Bristol was completed in 1768; thereupon a ballad of a friar crossing a Bristol bridge in the reign of Edward IV. was inserted in a local journal as appropriate to the occasion: it was so sweet in its simplicity and rich in poetry while so much judgment tempered the composition and such correctness was shown in every archaeological detail that it struck with amazement all persons of literary taste who read it: the author being inquired after was found to be an attorney's snub-nosed apprentice who copied precedents: the inquirer, becoming the victim of a thousand-fold multiplied admiration and wonder, was astounded that such a queer boy turned out to be the author of such a fine ballad! The world marvelled too, but became, and remains to this day, a believer that Chatterton composed all the fragments which he himself, in the first instance, truly and honestly ascribed to Rowley and other poets, who flourished in different centuries; the consequence of which is that their poems form a very curious and interesting medley of various archaic words belonging to several mediaeval periods. From the poems ascribed to Lydgate (wrongly written by Chatterton, Ladgate) not being printed elsewhere, we must infer that those fragments of his, and, by induction, the fragments of the other poets, were not multiplied in copies; consequently we must conclude that they were all so highly prized by their possessor in the fifteenth century, the rich Bristol merchant, Canynge, the founder of St. Mary Redcliffe, that in his last will he bequeathed the whole of these protographs, to be locked up in strong iron coffers, and deposited for safety in the church he had erected, believing, no doubt, and with much propriety, that if he placed them in a sacred edifice their preservation would be secured for the benefit of posterity. Unfortunately, if so, the stupidity of the Town Clerk and the Mayor and Aldermen of Bristol in 1727 frustrated the intention of the enlightened merchant; for when in that year those civic functionaries examined the papers in the muniment room over the north porch of St. Mary Redcliffe for the purpose of reserving only those that were valuable, they threw away as worthless all but the title deeds relating to the church. They thus secured an immortal fame for Chatterton by enabling him (through the aid of his uncle, the sexton), to get at the contents of the chests, select what parchments he pleased, and place before the world poems which he candidly acknowledged were not his own, but which he seems to have modernised, to have smoothed the verse (his own common-place rhymes showing that he had an exquisite ear for harmony; but nothing else); and here and there to have interpolated (or supplied missing, erased, and undecypherable) words, which spoilt lines, but could not spoil the poems as masterpieces, from the classic form in which they are cast, their power of thought, brilliance and vigour of imagination, happiness of invention, and extraordinary depth of sensibility. One cannot help recalling Dogberry's saying that "good looks come by Fortune and learning by Nature" when contemplating the universal belief that Chatterton wrote the poems of Rowley.
[Endnote 297] I cannot help thinking that some confusion may arise in the mind of the reader from misunderstanding the concluding expression of Bracciolini: literally he says: "provision is made for me in the way of food and clothing with which I am satisfied, for out ofthisvery great costliness of the means of living even the king does not get more": from such language one is almost induced to think that, in common with the sovereign, he had the use of the royal kitchen and the royal wardrobe; in other words, that he was living in the royal palace, and faring just as the king himself; but this was not the case: during his stay in England, he resided with Cardinal Beaufort in the London Palace of the Prince Prelate: he means that in eatables and raiment he was as well off as the king: he is alluding to the circumstance that, notwithstanding his means and position, he was not bound down to the style of apparel and meals as regulated by the law, which, for more than half a century, (since the days of Edward III.,) had prohibited all who were not possessed of more than £100 a year (as was the case with himself) from using gold and silver in their dress, and had limited their grandest entertainment to one soup and two dishes.
[Endnote 303] "To place the Moon in the Ram!" Well, the expression certainly in its eccentricity is quite equal to the phraseological excursion to the moon of Madame de Sévigné, who, meaning to speak of attempting an impossibility, writes "lay hold of the moon with the teeth"—prendre la lune avec les dents!" Bracciolini, who, in his letters to Niccoli puts me in mind of Dean Swift in his letters to Dr. Arbuthnot, (as far as using words and inventing terms to bother and perplex his friend,) has here fairly put his editors at a non plus from the first in Basle to the last in Florence; he is up in a balloon—clean out of their sight,—so they all print Aries in the accusative and with a small a—"poneres lunam in arietem,"—which not at all understanding, I have changed the phrase to what it is in the text. Bracciolini by the Ram is referring neither to the male sheep nor the battering instrument of war among the Romans, but the vernal sign: he had evidently read Roger Bacon, and believed with the "Somersetshire Magician," (as the Brother of the Minor Order was styled by his contemporaries), that a man's neck is subject to the power of the Bull, his arms to that of the Twins, and his head or brains to that of the Ram: When "the Moon" then, "is in the Ram," a lunatic is surely doubly mad, suffering, as he does, from the combined influences of the Moon, (especially when full), and of the Ram, —particularly at the beginning of April, the first day of which is amusingly consecrated to fools, and has been so worshippingly set apart in consequence of the belief that was entertained by the Benedictine man of science respecting the Constellation of the Zodiac that is the sign of April—"caput est de complexione Arietis" (Rog. Bacon. Opus Majus. p. 240).
[Endnote 357] The way in which Bracciolini wrote Latin verse will be seen in the following epitaph which he composed in honour of his preceptor in the Greek language, Emanuel Chrysolarus:—
Hic est Emanuel situsSermonis decus Attici,Qui dum quaerere spem patriaeAfflictae studeret, huc iit;Res belle cecidit tuisVotis Italia. Hic tibiLinguae restituit decus,Atticae ante reconditae.Res belle cecidit tuisVotis Emanuel. SoloConstitutus in ItaloAeternum decus, et tibiQuale Graecia non deditBello perdita Graecia.
The fact, then, is that,—putting aside false quantities,—he was more eloquent and poetic when he was writing prose than when he was writing poetry.
[Endnote 401] Don Pio Mutio in his "Meditations upon Tacitus" forms a very different estimate of this description; he places the account of this tempest which carried Germanicus into the ocean in that part of his dissertation where he speaks of Tacitus as "marvellous in description",—"nelle descrittioni maraviglioso", —portraying things with such magnificent clearness that you can see them as distinctly on his page as if you were looking at a picture on canvas or cardboard done by an eminent artist;—"portando egli le cose con tanta maestà e chiarezza, che quasi ce le fa vedere nella sua scrittura, come farebbe eccellente pittore in una tela o tavolo" (Considerationi sopra Cornelio Tacito. p. 481 Brescia Ed. 1623). Mutio's "Meditations" are no meditations on Cornelius Tacitus but Poggio Bracciolini; for they are not meditations upon all the historical productions that pass under the name of Tacitus,—not even upon the whole of the Annals, but only the first book of it; almost every passage of which,—certainly, every sentiment is elucidated, or rather, expatiated upon with signal originality and shrewdness of view, so as to have won the admiration and praise in no fewer than five of his epigrams of Benedetto Sossago, Mutio's fellow-countryman and contemporary, well skilled in scholastic acquirements, philosophy and theology, a doctor of the Ambrosian College at Milan, and a writer distinguished principally for poems in Latin,—"Sylvae"; "Opuscula Sacra"; two books of "Odes"; seven books of "Epigrams"; and according to the Abbot Picinelli, in his "Atenco de i Letterati Milanesi", Sossago would have added to these an epic about Borromeo, had he not died in the midst of composing the "Caroleis", which was to have made his name a "familiar household word" to all posterity. The "Biographie Universelle", which Madame Desplaces's editor of it, M. Charles Nodier, says, is "one of the greatest and most useful conceptions of our age" ought, (because it is so useful and great), to have contained a memoir of Mutio, for he was a most accomplished politician: in addition to these "Meditations on Tacitus" which are filled with political wisdom, he wrote another treatise also on politics and also in Italian: he was Abbot of the Benedictine Monastery of Monte Casino, and went on several important embassies to the French Court during the reign of Louis XIII. His work on the First Book of the Annals, —which is a commentary divided into 358 meditations or considerations comprised in a quarto of over 600 closely printed pages,—goes a long way in proving the truth of my theory, because it is one of the half-dozen or so of substantive books, (and bulky tomes, too), which were devoted exclusively to a consideration of the Annals in less than a century after the whole of that work was first placed before the world, showing its remarkable attractiveness, and what great attention MUST have been paid to it, had it been as old as it is generally supposed to be; but, (as I have observed in the text, p. 16), there not having been a word said about it from the second to the fifteenth century is all but proof positive of its non-existence during those 1,300 years.
[Endnote 408: "What has rendered 'Tacitus' obscure", says the Rev. Thomas Hunter in that book of his from which I have so frequently quoted, "is the refinement of his sentiments; which, like some minims in Nature, require uncommon sagacity and artificial power to assist you in the knowledge of." I cannot help thinking that these remarks are much more, if not solely applicable to the author of the Annals, (consequently, Bracciolini), than to Tacitus, as well as these further observations on the difficulty of the Latin:—"Let a reader take Livy in hand without translation or notes, if he is but a moderate adept in the Latin tongue, he will find little difficulty in many chapters together, except where some plodding editor brings in an awkward word to confound common sense and spoil a beautiful antithesis. If he is a proficient in the Roman language, he will read a book from end to end, with little hesitation or doubt concerning his meaning in any place: but a good classical scholar, who sits down to Tacitus, disclaiming the assistance of commentary or translation, will meet with difficulties in every book, and frequently in every page". (Observations upon Tacitus. pp. 218-9.) Archdeacon Browne, speaking of the style of "Tacitus," says (in his "History of Roman Classical Literature," p. 487), "his brevity … is the necessary condensation of a writer whose thoughts flow more quickly than his tongue could express them. Hence his sentences are suggestive of far more than they express: they are enigmatical hints of deep and hidden meaning, which keep the mind active and the attention alive, and delight the reader with the pleasures of discovery and the consciousness of difficulties overcome." "The thoughts flowing more quickly than the tongue" (that is, the pen) "can express them," is an apt phrase, (without the Archdeacon knowing how truthfully he was speaking), for the embarrassment under which a fabricator labours when endeavouring, not only to write like an ancient, but to assimilate his style to that of another, which being quite different to his own, he is conscious that, strive as he may, he will never come up to a close resemblance to the original. The reader no doubt recalls Bracciolini's own description of his task when he first set about forging the Annals: "Beginnings of any kind are arduous and difficult; as what the ancients did pleasantly, quickly and easily to ME istroublesome, tedious and burdensome":—"In quibusvis quoque rebus principia sunt ardua et difficilia; ut quod antiquioribus in officio sit jucundum, promptum ac leve, MIHI sitmolestum, tardum, onerosum." (See pages 192 and 266 of this work).
End of Project Gutenberg's Tacitus and Bracciolini, by John Wilson Ross