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In beginning the investigation, I shall proceed on the assumption that it is a modern forgery of the fifteenth century, having as grounds for this assumption that it was the age when the original MSS. containing the work were discovered; that the existence of those MSS. cannot be traced farther than that century; that it was an age of imposture; of credulity so immoderate that people were easily imposed upon, believing, as they did, without sufficient evidence, or on slight evidence, or no evidence at all, whatever was foisted upon them; when, too, the love of lucre was such that for money men willingly forewent the reputation that is the accompaniment of the grandest achievements of the intellect. Take, for example, the noble art of printing; for inventing it any man of genius might reasonably be proud. His name, if known, would be emblazoned on the scroll of imperishable fame; be displayed for ever on the highest pyramid of mind; and his country would receive an additional beam of splendor to its previous blaze of renown. But who, for a certainty, knows the inventor of printing? or the country of its origin? Was it Holland in the person of Coster of Haarlem? Or Germany in the person of Mentel, the nobleman, of Strasburg? Or Guttenberg, the goldsmith, of Mayence? Was it neither of these countries? or none of these men? And why this uncertainty? Because a few men possessing the secret, which they kept cautiously to themselves, of printing by means of movable blocks of wood, preferred accumulating enormous sums, equivalent to fair fortunes, by receiving five, six and even between seven and eight hundred gold sequins from a King of France or a Pope of Rome, a Cardinal or an Archbishop, for a bible, which, printed, was passed off as written. We all know how the whole imposture exploded, by the King of France and the Archbishop of Paris comparing the bibles which they had bought of Faust during his stay at the Soleil d'Or in the Rue St. Jacques, Paris. Each thought his bible so superb that the whole world could not produce such another for beauty,--the books being fine vellum copies of what are now known as the Mazarin Bible;--and what was their amazement on discovering, after a very close comparison, that everything was exactly alike in the two copies,--the flower-pieces in gold, green and blue, with grouped and single birds amid tendrils and leaves, the illuminated letters at the beginning of books with variegated embellishments and brilliant hues of scarlet and azure, the crimson initials to each chapter and sentence, along with astonishing and incomprehensible conformity in letters, words, pagination and lines on every page.

Here it may be noticed that the figures of speech of Tacitus are, like those of most ancient Romans, chiefly military. To be of the highest rank is, with him, "to lead the van,"--"primum pilum ducere" , or to set about a thing, "to be girt" ,--"accingi" . The author of the Annals, though borrowing the latter phrase, goes anywhere but to the field of battle for his figures; he takes them mostly from the ways of ordinary civil life, selecting his metaphors, now from the trader's shop or the merchant's counting-house, as "ratio constat" , used when the debtor and creditor sides of an account balance one another; now from seamen steering and tacking vessels, or coachmen driving horses, as "verbis moderans" , which Nipperdey says ought to be rendered, "touching-up and reining-in his words, and driving only at this."

"Labeone insanior inter Sanos dicatur."

Hitherto Horace by the side of "Tacitus" has been no better than a clay pitcher by a porcelain vase; thus his disparaging, but, doubtless, quite correct estimate of Labeo has been till now altogether disregarded, in consequence of this passage in the Annals, from its author being credited with having exceeded what the ancient Romans had left us in the way of history.

Hence, too, Dr. Nipperdey, in drawing up a table of the Augustan family, in order to guard the reader against being perplexed by the relationships of that house, treats the same Suetonius as of no account when he says,--and Suetonius twice says it ,--that Drusus, the brother of Tiberius, married "the younger Antonia." "In default of other evidence on the question of fact," says the learned professor, "we must follow the better author, Tacitus,"--the better author being the writer of the Annals, who, on two occasions , makes the "elder Antonia" the wife of Drusus.

Examples of this description could be multiplied. But it is not necessary to pursue this line of argument farther,--at least, at present. What is required just now is not so much proof that the author of the Annals did not write like the Romans, but that he did not write like Tacitus, notwithstanding the strenuous efforts he made to imitate him, and be mistaken for him by contemporaries and posterity. To do this I must bring forward from the History and the Annals an accumulation of coincidences, seeing that the fabricator, being a most acute person, must have proceeded upon the same principle as a man who forges a cheque upon a banker, and who, in the prosecution of his design, endeavours to imitate, as closely as he can, the handwriting of his victim, and do everything carefully enough to escape immediate detection, whatever may afterwards ensue.

SUSPICIOUS CHARACTER OF THE ANNALS FROM THE POINT OF TREATMENT.

We are to look, first, what the nature of the history purports to be;--whether there is nothing peculiar as to its character.

It will be obvious to the least sagacious that the most paramount and absolutely necessary thing to be accomplished was a vast and comprehensive execution that should correspond to the vast and comprehensive execution of Tacitus. Here was something to be done seemingly insuperable; for how can any one hope to imitate the execution of another, with such marvellous nicety that no distinction can be discerned between the two on the minutest test of microscopic investigation? more especially if the execution to be imitated be that of a man of real genius, consequently unparalleled in its way, of a mighty nature, and, in addition to its mightiness, a thing of the purest individuality. Now, the History of Tacitus is an execution of this description; it is a work of real genius; therefore, it is a distinct essence,--a realization of all the special aptitude possessed by the master-spirit that penned it. But though this cannot be done, yet any one having genius,--and a powerful genius,--by following its bent directly, may expect to exhibit in the execution of a work an ability that shall be considered equal to the ability displayed in the execution of another, even though that other be a man of great genius; but it can only be upon this very sage precaution,--that he exercises his ability, which must necessarily be of a very different kind, in quite a different manner. The forger of the Annals had much too acute a discernment not to know this;--he was also well aware that he had a very strong forte. We know the department in which he excelled,--dealing with despotism, servility and bloodshed. But then, if he was to do this, he would do that, which would be a very strong proof that his work was a forgery; for if he was to do this, he could not take up the continuance of history as Tacitus intended to go on with it namely, with Nerva and Trajan;--that he could not do, because in dealing with those two rulers he would have to deal with men remarkable for mildness, generosity, leniency and good- heartedness;--thus he would have to deal with a subject which must be fatal to his attempt; for it would be opposed to the play of his peculiar gifts, which to be brought out properly required that he should write only of Emperors noted for cruel, unnatural, blood-thirsty tyranny. The plan of his undertaking, to be attended with success, therefore compelled him, whether he liked it or not, to go back to Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero.

Such disagreements, due,--in all probability, more than to anything else,--to the occasional failure of the memory,--are sufficient in themselves to prove that the Annals and the History did not proceed from the same source. Accordingly, the man who forged the Annals, having apparently, this overwhelming and troublesome difficulty ever uppermost in his mind, seems to have taken measures for guarding against it as well as he could, and with as much care as he could. This taking precautions against the failure of memory must have been one of the main reasons, why he elected writing of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, when, as Tacitus, he ought to have written of Nerva and Trajan. He was thus enabled to relate a series of events prior to, and entirely different from the series of events related by Tacitus; there was thereby no possibility of his narrative clashing with that of his archetype; the most trying difficulties were in this way got over with sufficient ease; the only danger was with regard to a few individuals who lived during the two periods, and a few facts, that trailed their circumstances from one period into the other; but his main history would have nothing in common with the main history of Tacitus.

"Incidit in Scyllam, qui vult vitare Charybdin."

How could he convince the world that Tacitus would act with such twofold inconsistency as to write of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, when he had said that he would not do so, on account of the number of writers who had recorded the occurrences of their reigns, and that if he resumed the duties of an historian it would be with the reigns of Nerva and Trajan. The world,--and nobody knew it better than the author of the Annals,--is easily convinced; and there is no inconsistency, however monstrous, that it considers unaccountable. He, therefore, set about the task of convincing the world that Tacitus did this. Acting up to his own maxim, that "the way to get out of disgraceful acts that are evident is by audaciousness": "flagitiis manifestis subsidium ab audacia petendum" , he resorted to audacity in a trick, which has been hitherto eminently successful,--making the world believe from a single remark which he introduced into his narrative as the double of Tacitus, that that noble Roman was really guilty of this twofold inconsistency, so that changeableness, unsteadiness of purpose and self-contradiction should seem to be his leading characteristics. Without ever intending to write the history of Augustus,--or he never would have begun the Annals with an introduction in which he epitomizes principal events in the Roman State from its very foundation, otherwise what had he left to himself in a subsequent historical composition of a prior date for an appropriate exordium,--he says in his third book that he would make the memorable events in the reign of Augustus the subject of a new history, should his health and life continue:--"cetera illius aetatis memorabo, si plures ad curas vitam produxero" --evidently only because Tacitus had said at the commencement of his History, that he had reserved as the employment of his old age, should his life be long enough, the reigns of Nerva and Trajan:--"quod si vita suppeditet, principatum Divi Nervae et imperium Trajani ... senectuti seposui" . There was then one and the same man saying in one place:--"I am going to write the History of Augustus when I am an old man;"--:--and in another place: "I am going to write the history of Nerva and Trajan when I am an old man"; .

The author of the Annals having done this, opened out before himself the very widest field for indulging in all sorts of contradictions; for, after this, who would not be, and who is not, prepared for any contradictions? The contradictions come; and they are strange and numerous.

If the Annals is really to be considered a forgery, this, instead of being a matter of surprise, ought to be just the thing to be expected; because a clever fabricator, foreseeing that he would be suspected, and eager to foil detection, would know that the curious inquirer into a research of the present description would thus become baffled at every turn from inability, if not to discover it himself, at least, to explain to the satisfaction and conviction of others, the incompatibility of the workings of one spirit in one book with the workings of the other spirit in the other book, when the two compositions were so differently contrived. But if the Annals is to be considered as genuine, then nobody can explain why the same individual should illustrate Roman history in this singular fashion,--both works being designed, as universally admitted, the one to be a complement to the other. What should be the inducement of the author of the Annals if he did not wish the world to deny that it was his handiwork to write his book so very differently from the History of Tacitus? For what was there in the times of Rome under Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian so very different from what the Roman Empire was under their immediate predecessors, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, that the part which has to do with events in the days of the first-named four emperors should treat of imperial transactions and be deficient in many of the memorials which claim notice in the part dealing with Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero; and, that the part which has to do with events in the times of the last-named four emperors should all but avoid what is amply recorded in the part, dealing with Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian, imperial occurrences finding but an occasional and almost accidental notice in the Annals, where the mind is encumbered with the minutiae of circumstantial details of individual deeds.

The character is too vague in its outlines to be any particular individual's; but as all its points fit many an Italian priest who became a Cardinal or a Bishop and a chief minister to a prince, in the time of the Renaissance, as well as in the period immediately before it, and that immediately after it,--it shows how men reflect the age they live in,--how the principal biographies in any certain time convey a pretty accurate idea of the tone of mind then prevailing; further, and above all, it shows to what a great degree the books of the Annals reflect the chief features of the period when they were written, and how deeply their author enters into the spirit of his age.

As with characters so with events. Heaps of passages in the Annals read like incidents in the fifteenth century. It is more like a picture in an Italian court at that period than in a Roman Emperor's in the first century, when the arrest is made of Cneius Novius for being found treacherously armed with a dagger while mixing with the throng of courtiers bowing to the prince; and then when he is stretched on the rack, no confession being wrung from him as to accomplices; and the doubt that prevailed whether he really had fellow-conspirators. "Cneius Novius, eques Romanus, ferro accinctus reperitur in coetu salutantium principem. Nam, postquam tormentis dilaniabatur, de se non infitiatus conscios non edidit, incertum an occultans."

HOW THE ANNALS DIFFERS FROM THE HISTORY.

This diversity of treatment results from the difference in the qualities of the writers. Tacitus possessed a consummate knowledge of the true policy of States, and the use and extent of government. Accordingly, he reveals measures necessary for the successful carrying on of war, or the proper and equitable administration of affairs in peace, while he places before us a graphic and presumably true picture of the mode in which the Romans ruled their Empire in the first century of the Christian aera. The author of the Annals was acquainted with an entirely different form and order of statesmanship and politics. Hence he immerses us in crooked turnings of false policy and dark intrigues of bad ambition, forcibly reminding us of what made the greatest portion of the European art of government in the fifteenth century towards the close of the mediaeval and the commencement of the modern periods. He favours us with a paucity of maxims relating to government in general, or the different branches and offices which make up the body politic; but enters, with tedious fulness, into the rise, operation, consequences and proper restraint of the genuine passions and natural propensities of mankind in individuals, public and private.

We search in vain in the History for any trace of the melancholy that we find in the Annals; and in vain do we look in the Annals for any pictures of virtue and lessons of wisdom which in the History are taught us by bright examples and illustrious actions. Had the same hand that wrote the Annals written the History, we should have had in the latter work a very different treatment. The record would have been dark and dismal, even to repulsion, the opportunities being ample for an historian of gloomy disposition to indulge his humour, when the character of the History is thus described with truth in the Preface to Sir Henry Saville's translation of it:--"In these four books we see all the miseries of a torn and declining state; the empire usurped; the princes murdered; the people wandering; the soldiers tumultuous; nothing unlawful to him that hath power, and nothing so unsafe as to be securely innocent." Then, after stating what we learn from the examples of Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian, the writer adds: "In them all, and in the state of Rome under them, we see the calamities that follow civil war, where laws lie asleep, and all things are judged by the sword." In going over such a dreary period of human history, Tacitus is as composed and cheerful as if he was dwelling on the gayest and brightest of themes.

The cause of this is to be found in the fact that there was nothing to overshadow the soul of Tacitus with gloom. However painful and dire may have been the constraint to other Romans during the fifteen years' rule of Domitian, he had no ground of complaint: far from that; for he says that he was advanced by that Emperor further in dignity than by Vespasian and Titus. In the reign of Trajan he must have been supremely happy; for he speaks of it himself as "a time of rare felicity,"--"rara temporum felicitate,"--when men might "think what they pleased and express what they thought." His domestic life must have been blest by the perfect devotion and tender attachment of a wife, who, then in her prime, had surely verified the brilliant hopes of the promising bride. In the maturity of his days he lived again in his children; for that he had children we know from the Emperor Tacitus, a century and a half after, boasting of being his descendant, a pride that was shared in the fifth century by Polemius, a Prefect of Gaul, as we learn from a remark of the Prefect's friend, Sidonius Apollinaris. He enjoyed the most brilliant of literary reputations, as the anecdote sufficiently reveals of a stranger, who, addressing him at a public spectacle, and being informed that he must know him well from his writings, remarked: "Then you must be either Tacitus or Pliny." He was happy in the friendship of Pliny the Younger, and men as good, eminent and distinguished as that elegant disciple of Cicero's.

This difference in the writing of Tacitus and the author of the Annals may be accounted for in many ways,--perhaps in none better than this:--When Tacitus lived no one despaired of public cares being attended to, or the plans of the wise being employed in advancing the national welfare; but when the author of the Annals lived, everybody despaired; private profligacy was as rampant as public misery, and, amid the universal degeneracy, scheming politicians disregarded the good and greatness of their country to be intriguers at court for the improvement of their position.

In addition to this very suspicious difference, there is another producing so much doubt that alone it seems to stamp with truth the theory of the Annals being a forgery.

Tacitus passes over in silence men renowned for learning who took no part in the historical events related by him. The author of the Annals, at the end of one historic year, before passing on to record the events of that which follows, mentions their deaths, as of the two famous juris-consults, Capito Ateius and Labeo Antistius. In this style of writing we detect two men differing from each other as widely as De Thou differs from Guicciardini: De Thou, confining himself to his own times, descends into minutiae, so as to record the deaths of the great men of his day; Guicciardini, with his eye fixed on his country, passes over memorials of individuals to dwell on the various causes which brought about the great changes in the civil and ecclesiastical policy of his stirring period.

Another thing extremely suspicious is that nowhere in his History, nor even in his biographical work, Agricola, does Tacitus introduce a whole letter. All that he does is to give the substance, and not the contents, as the letter from Tiberius to Germanicus in Germany. Elsewhere he refers merely to the contents of letters, as in the second book of the History . Speeches are found in his works, for this reason:--Speeches form no small part of what is transacted in the senate, at the army and before the emperor; they issue to the public, they pass through the mouths of men, and they form much weighty matter. Tacitus then seems to have thought that if he inserted speeches, he would be maintaining the majesty of history by attending to great matters, but that if he inserted letters, as they refer generally to private affairs, he would be faulty as an historian, by ceasing to be grave and becoming trifling. There is no accounting, then, for the letter that is found in the Annals , if we are to assume that that work was the composition of Tacitus, except we are ready to admit that he was capable of descending from the accustomed gravity of his lofty historical manner to be a rival for supremacy in the small style of such indifferent memoirists, as Vulcatius Gallicanus, who has almost as many letters as there are pages in his very short life of the Emperor Avidius Cassius.

Nobody can satisfactorily explain why, or how it was possible that, Tacitus should have contradicted in the Annals what he says in the History of the Legions of Rome and the Praetorian and Urban Cohorts. He tells us in his History that his countrymen had legions in Britain, Gaul, and Italy; in the Annals we are told that the Romans had no troops in those countries. We gather from the Annals, that there were eight legions in Germany, three in Spain, and two each in Moesia, Africa, and Pannonia; from the History we find that there were seven legions in Germany, three in Moesia, two in Spain, and one each in Africa and Pannonia. We are told in the History that the Praetorian Cohorts were nine, in the Annals ten. So we are told in the History that the Urban Cohorts were four , and in the Annals three . It matters not what are the right statements in these several instances; all that concerns us in our inquiry is that, here beyond all question are two different men, possessing quite a different knowledge, informing us about the same things; and the disagreements would be mighty puzzling on any other theory than that which we are advancing,--that two different men wrote the History and the Annals.

We shall hereafter more particularly distinguish the two works by other differences in their matter and form, the manner of their authors, and the substance of the things treated of: for the present we may proceed to distinguish them by some differences in their style and language.

Now, the author of the Annals seems to have displayed remarkable diligence in a careful study of the style and language of Tacitus with the view of reproducing them in the multiplicity and variety of expressions that would necessarily occur in the course of the very long work he meditated forging. To judge from his handiwork, he was specially struck by certain peculiarities:--such as dignified and powerful expression, with extraordinary conciseness joined to loftiness of diction;--hence, his brevity, being dissembled, and altogether foreign to his own natural diction, which was most copious, has a hardness and obscurity, of which the brevity of Tacitus is totally void. He seems to have furthermore observed how the language of Tacitus has a poetical complexion, is figurative, nor altogether free from oratorical tinsel with mixture of foreign, especially Greek construction, and the most peculiar, new and unusual turns of expression, alliterations and similar endings of words. Yet notwithstanding all this care and diligence he was utterly incapable of approaching in language and style so close to the great original he pretended to be as to be confounded with him; he was, indeed, not a bit more successful in approaching his prototype, than that emulous imitator of Tacitus, Ammianus Marcellinus.

THE LATIN AND ALLITERATIONS IN THE ANNALS.

There was in his time a regular profession of transcribers, who may be looked upon as the precursors of printers. Numbered among them were some who had great fame for transcribing;--learned men, who knew Latin almost, if not quite, as well as they knew their mother-tongue, Cosimo of Cremona, Leonardo Giustiniani of Venice, Guarino of Verona, Biondo Flavio, Gasparino Barzizza, Sarzana, Niccoli, Vitturi, Lazarino Resta, Faccino Ventraria, and some others;--in fact, a host; for nearly all the literary men, in consideration of the enormous sums they obtained for copies of the ancient classics carefully and correctly written, devoted themselves to the occupation of transcription, as, in these times, men of the highest attainments in letters, some, too, of the greatest, even European, celebrity, give their services, for the handsome remunerations they receive, to the newspaper and periodical press. But, in the fifteenth century, the vast majority of writers of manuscripts,--those who were in general employment from not commanding the high prices obtained by the "crack" transcribers, and might be compared to "penny-a-liners" among us, suppliers of scraps of news to the papers,--were still to be found only in convents, knowing more about ploughs than books, and for literary acquirements standing on a par with professors of handwriting and dancing masters of the present day. These monkish transcribers wrote down words as daws or parrots articulate them; for just as these birds do not know the meaning of what they utter, so these scribes in monasteries did not understand the signification of the phrases which they copied. We can easily understand how to these manipulators of the pen an infinite number of passages in the Annals, which are still "posers" to the most expert classical professors in the leading Universities of Europe, must have been as dark as the Delphic Oracle,--or the Punic speech of the Carthaginian in Plautus's Comedy of Poenulus to everybody .

The jumble occasioned by the interminable blunders of the monastic writers causes both the codices of the Annals to be phenomena for confusion. Unique as literary gems, and preserved in the Laurentian Medicean Library in Florence, they are the greatest attraction to literary sightseers visiting the lucky library in which they are carefully deposited; and, I believe, have a fancy value set upon them as a fancy value is set upon the Koh-i-noor.

On account of the corruption of the text in the two oldest MSS. that supply the Annals,--the First and Second Florence,--I am aware what care must be taken, when touching upon the Latin in the Annals, not to ascribe to the author faults that were the errors of other people. One ought to be guarded when coming across "reditus," which ought to be "rediturus" , and "datum," which ought to be "daturum" .

I must pause to observe that, here as elsewhere, in examining the Latinity of the Annals, I cite from the original editions of the last six books by Vindelinus of Spire published in 1470, and the first six books by Beroaldus published in 1515, all editions now in use having "rediturus" and "daturum," but without the authority of a single MS.

These blunders we may fairly father on the monkish transcribers, the more so as their handiworks abound with faults, arising from one of these four causes,--inability of perceiving propriety of expression; which people call "stupidity"; disinclination to the requisite exertion; known as "laziness";--misunderstanding the meaning of the author, or destitution of knowledge.

And--

The second in the Georgics:

And shortly after,

And the third in the Aeneid:

The Latinity, therefore, is good; but though good, it can scarcely be said to be that of an ancient Roman; for an ancient Roman never resorted to such inflexions in prose, only when writing poetry to get over the difficulties of rhythm; hence a modern European would easily fall into the error, from taking the Latin of Virgil to be most perfect; and from deeming that what was done in verse could, with equal propriety, be done in prose.

The author of the Annals is quite as remarkable as Tacitus for antithesis: sometimes two antitheses occur together in Tacitus in the same clause. He is as remarkable for an equal balancing of phrases. But only in the Annals is the style of Tacitus mingled with the manner of some other Roman writer, as the easy and flowing redundance of Livy ; the peculiar alliterations, triplets, ring of the sentences and flow of narrative of Sallust , the antiquated expressions, new words, Greek idioms, and concise and nervous diction throughout of that historian; along with words and phrases, borrowed from the poets, especially Tibullus, Propertius, Catullus, above all, Virgil.

After this overwhelming proof of forgery, I need not press another syllable upon the reader. If not convinced by this, he will be convinced by nothing; for here is just that little blunder which a forger is sure to make: so far from being insignificant it is all- important; it swells out into proportions of colossal magnitude, at once disclosing the whole imposture, it being absolutely impossible that Tacitus should have so systematically adhered to a particular kind of alliteration in that part of his history which deals with Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian, and have so suddenly and utterly neglected or ignored it in that part of the history which deals with Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero.

END OF BOOK THE FIRST.

BOOK THE SECOND.

BRACCIOLINI IN ROME.

Though I have dwelt on the harshness of style and manner, and the occasional inaccuracies in grammar and language of the author of the Annals, it must not be supposed that I fail to appreciate his merit. In some of the qualities that denote a great writer he is superior to Tacitus; nor can anyone, not reading him in his original form, conceive an adequate notion of how his powers culminate into true genius,--what a master he is of eloquence, and how happy in expressing his very beautiful sentiments, which, sometimes having the nature of a proverb or an epigram, please by the placing of a word. His general ideas are scarcely retained in a translation: such a reproduction deprives them of the train of images and impressions which cluster round them in his language of poetry and suggestion, giving them spirit and interest, and imparting to them strength and ornament:--As winter is thrown over a landscape by the hand of nature, so coldness is thrown over his page by the hand of a translator: the student who can familiarize himself with his thoughts as expressed in the tongue in which he wrote, and reads a translation, is in the position of a man who can walk in summer along the bank of a majestic river flowing beautifully calm and stately by meadows pranked with flowers and woods waving in varied hues of green, yet prefers visiting the scene in winter when life and freshness are fled, the river being frozen, the flowers and greenness gone from the fields, and the leaves fallen from the trees.

The question arises,--Who was this wonderful man? If unknown, can he not be discovered?

The age of that writer was instinct with mental power: men were giants of intellect: Italy had soared to the highest pinnacle in the domain of mind, unequalled by preceding ages, except those of Pericles and Augustus: beginning in the fourteenth Century with Dante and Petrarch, and ending at the beginning of the sixteenth with the father of the modern political system, Machiavelli, it rose to the highest point of its altitude, and remained there through the whole of the fifteenth, when such bright lights shone constantly in the meridian of mind, as that Prince of the Church, Cardinal Sadoleti, great as a poet, equally great as a philosopher, whose poems on Curtius and the Curtian Lake and the Statue of Laocoon would have done honour to Virgil, while in his "De Laudibus Philosophiae" Cicero lives again in style and manner of thinking.

During that long interval of splendour, achievements of the intellect are upon record that fully establish the existence of the most remarkable genius. Poliziano in a letter to Prince Pico of Mirandola tells of one of these marvellous feats that was done by a youthful prodigy, only eleven years old, of the great family of Orsini . First young, Fabio Orsini sang; then recited verses of his own: requested to turn the verse into prose, he repeated the same thoughts unfettered by measure in an unassuming manner, and with an appropriate and choice flow of expression. After that subjects were proposed to him for epistolary correspondence, on which he was to dictate ex tempore to five amanuenses at once, the subjects given being "of a nature so novel, various, and withal so ludicrous that he could not have been prepared for them": after a moment's pause he dictated a few words to the first amanuensis on one subject; gave his instructions on a different theme to the second; proceeded in like manner with the rest, then returning to the first, "filled up every chasm and connected the suspended thread of his argument so that nothing appeared discordant or disjointed," and, at the same instant, finished the five letters. "If he lives," concluded Poliziano, "to complete the measure of his days," and "perseveres in the path of fame, as he has begun, he will, I venture to predict, prove a person, whom, for admirable qualities and attainments, mankind must unite to venerate as something more than human."

In that age some men had such an enthusiastic predilection to antiquity that they were animated by an ardent zeal for collecting ancient manuscripts, medals, inscriptions, statues, monumental fragments, and other ancient and classical remains. Others, again, were suspected of the intention to impose their own productions on the public as works of antiquity; one man, who never ceased to regret that it had not been his lot to live in the days of Roman splendour, Peter of Calabria, styled himself in his Commentaries on Virgil, Julius Pomponius Sabinus, and in his notes to Columella, Julius Pomponius Fortunatus, his object in both instances being that he should be mistaken for some Roman who had flourished in the purest ages of Latinity; and Foy-Vaillant, the celebrated numismatist of the seventeenth century, actually places him, in one of his numismatical works, in the list of ancient authors, while Justus Lipsius and Pithaeus both took him to have been a "Grammaticus", or "writer in Latin," of the earlier middle ages, all the time that he was an Italian academician, who flourished in the fifteenth century, having been born in 1425 at a place that has been called "The Garden of Almond Trees,"-- Amendolara, in Upper Calabria.

It would be idle to suppose that the author of the Annals was actuated by the simple purpose of Peter of Calabria; there is ground for believing that some deeper, and less pure, motive instigated him to commit forgery. Though no Peter of Calabria, he was a matured Fabio Orsini; and the only drawback from his fabricated work is that it is not to be looked upon as Roman history, always in the most reliable shape, but rather as a form of the imagination which he selected for expressing his views on humanity;--to paint crime; to castigate tyranny; to vindicate honesty; to portray the abomination of corruption, the turpitude of debauchery and the baseness of servility;--to represent fortitude in its strength and grandeur, innocence in its grace and beauty, while standing forth the sturdy admirer of heroism and freedom; the tender friend of virtue in misfortune; the austere enemy of successful criminality, and the inflexible dispenser of good and evil repute.

That a man of such great parts and extensive learning, with such fine thoughts, beautiful sentiments and wise reflections;--such a cool, abstracted philosopher, yet such an over-refined politician;--such a gloomy moralist, yet such an acute, fastidious observer of men and manners, was a cloistered monk or any obscure individual whatever was an idea to be immediately dispelled from the mind, for that the Annals was composed by such a man would have been about as incomprehensible an occurrence, as it would be impossible to conceive that an acrobat who exercises gymnastic tricks upon the backs of galloping horses in an American circus could discharge the functions of a First Lord of the Treasury or a Justice in the High Court of Judicature, or that a pantaloon in a Christmas pantomime could think out the Principia of Sir Isaac Newton or the Novum Organum of Lord Bacon. The fact was, the author was a conspicuous, shining light of his generation; the associate of princes and ministers; who, from the commanding position of his exalted eminence, cast his eyes over wide views of mankind that stretched into sweeping vistas of artifice and dissimulation; and who, for close upon half a century, participated prominently in the active business,--the subdolous and knavish politics,--of his time.

Poggio Bracciolini was not only the author of that fable, I am now about to bring forward reasons for believing, and with the view of inducing the reader to agree with me, that he,--and nobody else but he,--was the writer of the Annals of Tacitus.

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