Page:A Dissertation on Reading the Classics and Forming a Just Style.djvu/231

Rh, what otherwise he must have written in looser Characters with less Strength and Beauty. And no Fault can be objected to the justest and exactest of the Roman Writers.

Livy, my Lord, is the most Considerable of the Roman Historians, if to the Perfection of his Style we join the Compass of his Subject. In which he hath the Advantage over all that wrote before him, especially Thucydides, whose History, however drawn out into Length, is conﬁned to the shortest Period of any, except what remaineth of Salust. No Historian could be happier in Rh