state I am) to write of the eldest times: wherein also why may
it not be said, that in speaking of the past, I point at the
present, and taxe the vices of those that are yet lyving, in
their persons that are long since dead; and have it laid to my
charge? But this I cannot helpe, though innocent.

He wrote of remote ages, and contributed nothing to historical
knowledge. But he enriched English literature with a 'just history',
as distinct from annals and chronicles.[5] 'I am not altogether
ignorant', he said, 'in the Lawes of Historie, and of the Kindes.'
When we read his lives and commendations of the great men of antiquity
as he pictured them, we cannot but regret that the same talents, the
same overmastering interest in the eternal human problems, had not
been employed in depicting men whom he had actually known. The other
Elizabethan work that ranks with Raleigh's in its conception of the
historian's office and in its literary excellence, deals with another
country. It is the _History of the Turks_ by Richard Knolles.

The character was definitely introduced into English literature when
the historians took as their subjects contemporary or recent events
at home, and, abandoning the methods of the chronicle, fashioned their
work on classical models. Its introduction had been further prepared
to some extent by the growing interest in lives, which, unlike
chronicles that recorded events, recognized the part played by men
in the control of events. In his _Advancement of Learning_ Bacon
regretted that Englishmen gave so little thought to describing the
deeds and characters of their great countrymen. 'I do find strange',
he said, 'that these times have so little esteemed the virtues of the
times, as that the writing of lives should be no more frequent.' He
and Hayward both wrote lives with the consciousness that their methods