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Rh his manuscripts in ages when shallow and superficial authors were in vogue; and it is among the ironies of fate that we have nearly complete the works of such epitomists as Florus, Eutropius, and Aurelius Victor, while at least thirty books of the most consummate of Roman chroniclers have fallen a prey to oblivion. A tardy compensation was indeed awarded to Tacitus, but far too late to atone for the injury he received from the negligence or caprice of his own countrymen. Gradually such portions of his writings as we have now were rescued piecemeal from the worms or the damp of their hiding-places; but not until the beginning of the sixteenth century of our era were the first five books of the 'Annals' found in the Abbey of Cernay, in Westphalia, and published for the first time in Rome, in 1515. From that date, with few dissenting voices, the historian has been the object of honour and applause. Bayle pronounced the 'Annals' and 'History' one of the grandest efforts of human intellect. That consummate scholar, Justus Lipsius, was so deeply versed in the books of Tacitus, that he offered to recite any passage with a dagger at his breast to be used against himself on a failure of memory. Politicians and philosophers, from the sixteenth century downwards, have regarded him as an oracle, in practical and speculative wisdom alike. That keen commentator on the foibles and vices of mankind, the essayist Montaigne, speaks of him with unusual enthusiasm; the greatest of Italian historians, Machiavelli, took Tacitus for his model; and the recreation of the great French mathematician D'Alembert, was to read the 'Annals' or the 'History' in those moments when he "let Euclid rest and Archimedes pause."