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.




CHAPTER III.

SUSPICIOUS CHARACTER OF THE ANNALS FROM THE POINT OF TREATMENT.


I. Nature of the history.--II. Arrangement of the narrative.--
III. Completeness in form.--IV. Incongruities, contradictions and
disagreements from the History of Tacitus.--V. Craftiness of the
writer.--VI. Subordination of history to biography.--VII. The
author of the Annals and Tacitus differently illustrate Roman
history.--VIII. Characters and events corresponding to characters
and events of the XVth century.--IX. Greatness of the Author of
the Annals.