list, pass good exercises betwixt you and Master NEVELL. There is great expectation of you both.
For method of writing history, BODEN hath written at large. You may read him, and gather out of many words, some matter.
This I think, in haste. A Story is either to be considered as a Story; or as a Treatise, which, besides that, addeth many things for profit and ornament. As a Story, he is nothing, but a narration of things done, with the beginnings, causes, and appendices thereof. In that kind, your method must be to have seriem temporum very exactly, which the chronologies of MELANCTHON, TARCHAGNORA, LANGUET and such others will help you to.
Then to consider by that . . . as you note yourself, XENOPHON to follow THUCYDIDES, so doth THUCYDIDES follow HERODOTUS, and DIODORUS SICULUS follow XENOPHON. So generally, do the Roman stories follow the Greek; and the particular stories of the present monarchies follow the Roman.
In that kind, you have principally to note the examples of virtue and vice, with their good or evil success; the establishment or ruins of great Estates, with the causes, the time, and circumstances of the laws then written of; the enterings and endings of wars; and therein, the stratagems against the enemy, and the discipline upon the soldier. And thus much as a very historiographer.
Besides this, the Historian makes himself a Discourser for profit; and an Orator, yea, a Poet sometimes, for ornament. An Orator; in making excellent orations, è re nata, which are to be marked, but marked with the note of rhetorical remembrances: a Poet; in painting for the effects, the motions, the whisperings of the people, which though in disputation, one might say were true—yet who will mark them well shall find them taste of a poetical vein, and in that kind are gallantly to be marked—for though perchance, they were not so, yet it is enough they might be so. The last point which tends to teach profit, is of a Discourser; which name I give to whosoever speaks non simpliciter de facto, sed de qualitatibus et circumstantiis facti: and that is it
