110 ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 



matters of triumph, ceremony, and novelty, with matters of 

 state. And it were to be wished that this distinction pre 

 vailed; but in our times journals are only used at sea and 

 in military expeditions, whereas among the ancients it was a 

 regal honor to have the daily acts of the palace recorded, 

 as we see in the case of Ahasuerus, king of Persia. 2 And 

 the journals of Alexander the Great contained even trivial 

 matters; 3 yet journals are not destined for trivial things 

 alone, as annals are for serious ones, but contain all things 

 promiscuously, whether of greater or of less concern. 



CHAPTEE X 



Second Division of Special Civil History into Pure and Mixed 



THE last division of civil history is into pure and 

 mixed. Of the mixed there are two eminent kinds 

 the one principally civil, and the other principally 

 natural: for a kind of writing has been introduced that does 

 not give particular narrations in the continued thread of a 

 history, but where the writer collects and culls them, with 

 choice, out of an author, then reviewing and as it were ru 

 minating upon them, takes occasion to treat of political sub 

 jects; and this kind of ruminated history we highly esteem, 

 provided the writers keep close to it professedly, for it is 

 both unseasonable and irksome to have an author profess 

 he will write a proper history, yet at every turn introduce 

 politics, and thereby break the thread of his narration. 

 AH wise history is indeed pregnant with political rules 

 and precepts, but the writer is not to take all opportuni 

 ties of delivering himself of them. 



Cosmographical history is also mixed many ways as 

 taking the descriptions of countries, their situations and 



2 Esther vi. 1. 



8 Plutarch s Symposium, i. qu. 6 and Alex. Life, xxiii. 76. 



