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