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.

II. This must have been greatly against his will as a forger,
because this difficulty must have risen up before his mental
vision in colossal magnitude--that nobody, on careful
consideration, could admit that Tacitus would have written the
narrative of the half-century from the death of Augustus to the
accession of Galba, after what he says at the commencement of his
History, that the subject next to engage his attention would be
the events that happened in the reigns of Nerva and Trajan. This,
I repeat, is a point that brings forcibly before us the certainty
of the Annals being forged, unless any one can believe with
Niebuhr that, if Tacitus completed his History before the death of
Trajan, and could not write of that Emperor as long as that
Emperor lived, but "feeling a void," and "desiring to produce
another work," he resumed History with the rule of Tiberius; but
nobody can believe this, because it gets us into this enormous,
nay, inexplicable difficulty--Why the writer, who, in the History,
had shown an epic construction, with an epic opening and an epic
story, should observe in the Annals quite another arrangement, and
distribute the narrative in a studiously annalistic form? when,
too, the disjointed record of the journalist was to be combined
with the distinct arrangement of the historian who took the
continued transactions of a nation in their multiplicity of
details as they occurred at the same time in different places, and
related them in clear and due unity in the subject.