Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles | Page 5

think of it as a fight between the opposing leaders, and the historians of their own time are always liable to attribute to the personal force of a statesman what is due to general causes of which he is only the instrument. Of these general causes Clarendon took little account. 'Motives which influenced masses of men', it has been said, 'escape his appreciation, and the History of the Rebellion is accordingly an account of the Puritan Revolution which is unintelligible because the part played by Puritanism is misunderstood or omitted altogether'.[7] But the History of the Rebellion is a Stuart portrait gallery, and the greatest portrait gallery in the English language.
[Footnote 1: Book II, ed. Aldis Wright, pp. 92-5.]
[Footnote 2: 'Histor? nostr? particulam quidam non male: sed qui totum corpus ea fide, eaque dignitate scriptis complexus sit, quam suscepti operis magnitudo postularet, hactenus plane neminem extitisse constat.... Nostri ex f?ce plebis historici, dum maiestatem tanti operis ornare studuerunt, putidissimis ineptiis contaminarunt. Ita factum est nescio qua huiusce insul? infoelicitate, ut maiores tui, (serenissima Regina) viri maximi, qui magnam huius orbis nostri partem imperio complexi, omnes sui temporis reges rerum gestarum gloria facile superarunt, magnorum ingeniorum quasi lumine destituti, iaceant ignoti, & delitescant.']
[Footnote 3: _Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century_, ed. Spingarn, vol. i, pp. 82-115.]
[Footnote 4: See also Camden Society Publications, No. 7, 1840.]
[Footnote 5: Roger Ascham in his Scholemaster divides History into 'Diaria', 'Annales', 'Commentaries', and 'Iustam Historiam'.]
[Footnote 6: Bacon told Queen Elizabeth that there was no treason in Hayward's _Henry IV_, but 'very much felony', because Hayward 'had stolen many of his sentences and conceits out of Cornelius Tacitus' (_Apophthegms_, 58). Hayward and Bacon had a precursor in the author of _The History of King Richard the Thirde_, generally attributed to Sir Thomas More, and printed in the collection of his works published in 1557. It was known to the chroniclers, but it did not affect the writing of history. Nor did George Cavendish's _Life and Death of Thomas Wolsey_, which they likewise used for its facts.]
[Footnote 7: C.H. Firth, 'Burnet as a Historian', in Clarke and Foxcroft's _Life of Gilbert Burnet_, 1907, pp. xliv, xlv.]

II. The Literary Models.
The authentic models for historical composition were in Greek and Latin. Much as our literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries owed to the classics, the debt was nowhere more obvious, and more fully acknowledged, than in our histories. The number of translations is in itself remarkable. Many of them, and notably the greatest of all, North's Plutarch, belong to the early part of Elizabeth's reign, but they became more frequent at the very time when the inferiority of our native works was engaging attention.[1] By the middle of the seventeenth century the great classical historians could all be read in English. It was not through translation, however, that their influence was chiefly exercised.
The classical historians who were best known were Thucydides, Polybius, and Plutarch among the Greeks, and Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius among the Latins; and the former group were not so well known as the latter. It was recognized that in Thucydides, to use Hobbes's words, 'the faculty of writing history is at the highest.'[2] But Thucydides was a difficult author, and neither he nor Polybius exerted the same direct influence as the Latin historians who had imitated them, or learned from them. Most of what can be traced ultimately to the Greeks came to England in the seventeenth century through Latin channels. Every educated man had been trained in Latin, and was as familiar with it for literary purposes as with his native tongue. Further, the main types of history--the history of a long period of years, the history of recent events, and the biographical history--were all so admirably represented in Latin that it was not necessary to go to Greek for a model. In one respect Latin could claim pre-eminence. It might possess no single passage greater than the character study of Pericles or of the Athenians by Thucydides, but it developed the character study into a recognized and clearly defined element in historical narrative. Livy provided a pattern of narrative on a grand scale. For 'exquisite eloquence' he was held not to have his equal.[3] But of all the Latin historians, Tacitus had the greatest influence. 'There is no learning so proper for the direction of the life of man as Historie; there is no historie so well worth the reading as Tacitus. Hee hath written the most matter with best conceit in fewest words of any Historiographer ancient or moderne.'[4] This had been said at the beginning of the first English translation of Tacitus, and it was the view generally held when he came to be better known. He appealed to Englishmen of the seventeenth century like no other historian. They felt the