important fragment which we have of four books, and a part of the
fifth, embracing but little more than one year. Whether he ever
carried into execution the design he had reserved for his old
age,--writing of Nerva and Trajan,--we have no record. But two
things seem tolerably certain; that he would have gone on with
that continuation to his History in preference to writing the
Annals; and that he would not have written that continuation until
after the death of the Emperor Trajan. He would then have been 73.
Now, how long would he have been on that separate history? Then at
what age could he have commenced the Annals? And how long would he
have been engaged in its composition? We see that he must have
been bordering on 80, if not 90: consequently with impaired
faculties, and thus altogether disqualified for producing such a
vigorous historical masterpiece; for though we have instances of
poets writing successfully at a very advanced age, as Pindar
composing one of his grandest lyrics at 84, and Sophocles his
Oedipus Coloneus at 90, we have no instance of any great
historian, except Livy, attempting to write at a very old age, and
then Livy rambled into inordinate diffuseness.

II. The silence maintained with respect to the Annals by all
writers till the first half of the fifteenth century is much more
striking than chronology in raising the very strongest suspicion
that Tacitus did not write that book. This is the more remarkable
as after the first publication of the last portion of that work by
Vindelinus of Spire at Venice in 1469 or 1470, all sorts and
degrees of writers began referring to or quoting the Annals, and
have continued doing so to the present day with a frequency which
has given to its supposed writer as great a celebrity as any name
in antiquity. Kings, princes, ministers and politicians have