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665 between Annals and History, QQ5 arrangement of his excellent work, unless his clear understand- ino' had confirmed the correctness of this view. And in truth the time of independent observation and perception begins with our riper youth: childhood is not only unable to think for itself, but scarcely heeds even a general calamity, and quickly forgets it. But I conceive that with everyone there is an essential difference between public events which a man recol- lects, though only as in a dream, to have heard of at the time they occurred, and those which preceded his birth ; the former we think of with reference to ourselves, the latter are foreign to us : the epoch and duration of the former we measure by our own life : the latter belong to a period for which our imao^ination has no scale. Thus in the former case, life and definiteness are imparted to all that we hear or read on the subject : above all with respect to the events of our boyhood, when every man, who is formed by nature to com- prehend the occurrences of history, passionately embraces or loathes things which, as apprehended by a child, were indeed mere names : though it is such names that exercise a magic power, from which nothing but mature judgement can secure Still the explanation is good for nothing as a general de- finition. For in what class should we reckon Sallust'^s Ju- gurtha, which in its construction is studiously opposed to the annalistic form ? and in what the greater part at least of the history of Herodotus, even though a portion might be excepted, from the probability that he was born at the time of the expe- dition of Xerxes. On the other hand, the pontifical annals drawn up year by year, and all contemporary chronicles, are by this definition converted into histories. Had the last books of the Histories of Tacitus, those in which he described Domitian^s tyranny, come down to us, it would have been clear how he treated two periods of similar character, one in the Annals, the other in the Histories: the period contained in the books preserved of the latter work, admits of no comparison with that which is the subject of the Annals. The Histories were the story of the Flavian line: they begin, not with the fall of Nero, but with the mutiny of the legions of Germany, which opened the series of events that