between Annals and History, 663 not need any limitation of time, at least for the details, and reject it whenever it interferes with the main design : they exclude everything that is connected with their subject by no other link than unity of time ; but as they embrace everything that is essentially germane to the matter, so they may be em- bellished with episodes, for which there is no room in the records of the other class. The latter confine themselves to the bare mention of the names of persons, nations, and cities, because the things they treat of are as familiar to countrymen and contemporaries for whose sake alone they are recorded, as to the authors themselves : but Narratives describe and explain, in order to present the distant, the past, and the unknown, clearly and vividly to the hearer'^s imagination. Records such as those above described, are annals or chronicles : for narratives usage has not stamped any such precise term, but I will venture to appropriate the name of histories to them. It is only at the outset that the two kinds are distinctly opposed to one another : they are then separated by a great waste: no sooner however does literature begin to make progress, than cultivation is applied on both sides, and 43vances, until the confines of the two provinces become am- biguous. Chronicles sometimes rise up to an animated history, and even unfold and illustrate themselves in episodes; though they carefully limit every narration within the circle of a year, and throw together contemporaneous occurrences, however heterogeneous, in motley disorder. On the other hand a his- tory, fully worthy of the name, like that of Thucydides or Polybius, may observe the annual periods very exactly. But it excludes whatever in its nature is alien to the subject, mere records, and all that is interesting only to contemporaries, no less necessarily than an epic poem. Everywhere it begins as a species of epic poem, and then its province lies in the remote past. But in time the deeds of an early generation grow foreign to their refined and altered posterity, who deem themselves a superior race: while the present, as it is more clearly surveyed, acquires greater im- portance in their eyes, than that of their forefathers had in theirs: it then invites to descriptions intended for distant regions and afterages. It is long ere a man arises who con- templates great events with the purpose of writing a history of
