BACON 



whence such accounts, which might otherwise live of them- 

 selves, may come to be utterly lost. 



CHAPTER IX 

 Second Division of the History of Times into Annals and Journals 



History of times is likewise divisible into annals and journals, 

 according to the observation of Tacitus, where, mentioning the 

 magnificence of certain structures, he adds : " It was found 

 suitable to the Roman dignity that illustrious things should 

 be committed to annals, but such as these to the public journals 

 of the city ; "a thus referring what related to the state of the 

 commonwealth to annals, and smaller matters to journals. And 

 so there should be a kind of heraldry in regulating the dignities 

 of books as well as persons : for as nothing takes more from the 

 dignity of a state than confusion of orders and degrees, so it 

 greatly takes from the authority of history to intermix matters 

 of triumph, ceremony, and novelty, with matters of state. And 

 it were to be wished that this distinction prevailed ; 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.^ And the journals of Alexander 

 the Great contained even trivial matters ; c 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. 



CHAPTER 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 aathor, then reviewing and, as 

 it were, ruminating upon them, takes occasion to treat of politi- 

 cal subjects ; and this kind of ruminated history we highly es- 

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



