Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/679

669 hetioeen Annals and History. 669 the campaigns of Germanicus, without any measure of time and place^ float by us like a dream. In general^ whatever censure may with any justice be passed upon him, affects these books : which are precisely those which his imitators have taken for their model. The Histories and the detached works seem to be proof against all objections. The six books, beginning with the eleventh, are in the main free from these imperfections, but the character of Annals is less distinctly preserved in them : if I may pursue the pre- ceding comparison, the dawn has already broken, and is grow- ing brighter and brighter, so that the part which would have immediately touched upon the History, must have been in fact homogeneous with it. The lost books, between the two por- tions preserved to us, undoubtedly presented a transition main- tained with a steady hand. Now, as the narrative necessarily unfolded itself more and more freely as it approached the Histories, it is an unmeaning error to add the title of xvii. of the Annals to the first book of the Histories. That it is found in manuscripts is of the less importance, because, according to Lipsius, it appears there as ian arrangement introduced by nameless hands {secundum quosdam); that is, by some sciolist of the fourteenth century, when philology was quite in its infancy. There is much better reason for conjecturing that the Annals contained full twenty books ; more than four are not too many for the time that is wanting down to the commencement of the History. The occasion which has led many to adopt that absurd title, and which induced Querengo, cited by Fabricius, somewhat more considerately, to make the Histories begin with the eighteenth book of the Annals, is the wellknown passage of St Jerome, who states the number of the books from the death of Au- gustus to Nerva to be thirty. But Lipsius and Bayle have already observed, that the Histories must have contained far more books than the share of this number due to the Annals would leave for them. Bayle was very near a conjecture which I hold to be certain. It is probable that the Histories com- prized thirty books, and that Jerome, by a very common oversight, mentioned the right number, but applied it erro^ neously to both works.