ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 53 



prolixity of their speeches, harangues, and accounts of actions ; 

 so that, in short, nothing is so seldom found among the writings 

 of men as true and perfect civil history. 



CHAPTER VI 

 Division of Civil History into Memoirs, Antiquities, and Perfect History 



This civil history is of three kinds, and bears resemblance to 

 three kinds of pictures ; viz., the unfinished, the finished, and the 

 defaced: thus civil history, which is the picture of times and 

 things, appears in memoirs, just history, and antiquities; but 

 memoirs are history begun, or the first strokes and materials of 

 it ; and antiquities are history defaced, or remnants that have 

 escaped the shipwreck of time. 



Memoirs, or memorials, are of two kinds ; whereof the one 

 may be termed commentaries, the other registers. In com- 

 mentaries are set down naked events and actions in sequence, 

 without the motives, designs, counsels, speeches, pretexts, 

 occasions, etc. ; for such is the true nature of a commentary, 

 though Caesar, in modesty mixed with greatness, called the best 

 history in the world a commentary. 



Registers are of two kinds ; as either containing the titles of 

 things and persons in order of time, by way of calendars and 

 chronicles, or else after the manner of journals, preserving the 

 edicts of princes, decrees of council, judicial proceedings, dec- 

 larations, letters of state, and public orations, without continu- 

 ing the thread of the narration. 



Antiquities are the wrecks of history, wherein the memory 

 of things is almost lost ; or such particulars as industrious per- 

 sons, with exact and scrupulous diligence, can any way collect 

 from genealogies, calendars, titles, inscriptions, monuments, 

 coins, names, etymologies, proverbs, traditions, archives, in- 

 struments, fragments of public and private history, scattered 

 passages of books no way historical, etc. ; by which means some- 

 thing is recovered from the deluge of time. This is a laborious 

 work ; yet acceptable to mankind, as carrying with it a kind of 

 reverential awe, and deserves to come in the place of those 

 fabulous and fictitious origins of nations we abound with; 

 though it has the less authority, as but few have examined and 

 exercised a liberty of thought about it. 



