Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles | Page 6

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 human interest of a
narrative based on what the writer had experienced for himself; and

they found that its political wisdom could be applied, or even applied
itself spontaneously, to their own circumstances. They were widely
read in the classics. They knew how Plutarch depicted character in his
Lives, and Cicero in his Speeches. They knew all the Latin historians.
But when they wrote their own characters their chief master was
Tacitus.
* * * * *
Continental historians provided the incentive of rivalry. They too were
the pupils of the Ancients, and taught nothing that might not be learned
equally well or better from their masters, but they invited the question
why England should be behind Italy, France, or the Low Countries in
worthy records of its achievements. In their own century, Thuanus,
Davila, Bentivoglio, Strada, and Grotius set the standard for modern
historical composition. Jacques Auguste de Thou, or Thuanus, wrote in
Latin a history of his own time in 138 books. He intended to complete
it in 143 books with the assassination of Henri IV in 1610, but his
labours were interrupted by his death in 1617. The collected edition of
his monumental work was issued in 1620 under the title _Iacobi
Augusti Thuani Historiarum sui temporis ab anno 1543 usque ad
annum 1607 Libri CXXXVIII_. Enrico Caterino Davila dealt with the
affairs of France from Francis II to Henri IV in his _Historia delle
guerre civili di Francia_, published in 1630. Cardinal Guido
Bentivoglio described the troubles in the Low Countries in his _Della
Guerra di Fiandra_, published from 1632 to 1639. Famianus Strada
wrote on the same subject in Latin; the first part of his _De Bella
Belgico_, which was meant to cover the period from 1555 to 1590 but
was not completed, appeared in 1632, and the second in 1647. Hugo
Grotius, the great Dutch scholar, had long been engaged on his
_Annales et Historiæ de Rebus Belgicis_ when he died in 1640; it was
brought out by his sons in 1657, and contained five books of Annals
from 1566 to 1588, and eighteen books of Histories to 1609. These five
historians were well known in England, and were studied for their
method as well as their matter. Burnet took Thuanus as his model. 'I
have made him ', he says, 'my pattern in writing.'[5] The others are
discussed by Clarendon in a long passage of his essay 'On an Active
and on a Contemplative Life'.[6] He there develops the view, not
without reference to his own history, that 'there was never yet a good

History written but by men conversant in business, and of the best and
most liberal education'; and he illustrates it by comparing the histories
of his four contemporaries:
Two of these are by so much preferable before the other Two, that the
first may worthily stand by the Sides of the best of the Ancients, whilst
both the others must be placed under them; and a Man, without
knowing more of them, may by reading their Books find the Difference
between their Extractions, their Educations, their Conversations, and
their Judgment. The first Two are _Henry D'Avila_ and Cardinal
_Bentivoglio_, both Italians of illustrious Birth; ... they often set forth
and describe the same Actions with very pleasant and delightful
Variety; and commonly the greatest Persons they have occasion to
mention were very well known to them both, which makes their
Characters always very lively. Both their Histories are excellent, and
will instruct the ablest and wisest Men how to write, and terrify them
from writing. The other Two were Hugo Grotius and _Famianus
Strada_, who both wrote in Latin upon the same Argument, and of the
same Time, of the Wars of _Flanders_, and of the _Low-Countries_.
He proceeds to show that Grotius, with all his learning and abilities,
and with all his careful revisions, had not been able to give his narrative
enough life and spirit; it was deficient in 'a lively Representation of
Persons and Actions, which makes the Reader present at all they say or
do'. The whole passage, which is too long to be quoted in full, is not
more valuable as a criticism than as an indication of his own aims, and
of his equipment to realize them. Some years earlier, when he was still
thinking 'with much agony' about the method he was to employ in his
own history, he had cited the methods of Davila, 'who', he added, 'I
think hath written as ours should be