become a mere artist, and to study chiefly how he may stimulate the feelings or please the taste of the reader, forgetful of his office as a registrar of true facts for purposes of instruction.(99)

§ 14 Thus far we have considered how history is liable to intentional falsification from motives of interest or vanity, or to the unintentional perversion which is engendered by negligence, acquiescence in popular rumours, and similar causes of inaccuracy. There are, however, other ways of corrupting the plain truth of historical narration. History may be knowingly blended with fiction, for the purpose of conveying a political or moral lesson, of instructing the reader by apposite examples, and suit

curiosi, et quamlibet nudâ rerum cognitione capiuntur, ut qui sermunculis etiam fabellisque ducantur.' Mere curiosity, the mere desire of knowledge, would lead them to take interest in descriptions of natural objects; but they do not take the same interest in these as in history. The true explanation is to be found in the well-known verse of Terence :

'Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.'

Cicero (Ep. ad Div. v. 12, § 2) also speaks of the pleasure of reading a narrative, which he attributes in part to the delight taken in contemplating dangers from which we are ourselves exempt.

The difference between history and science, with respect to the superior attractiveness of the former, is pointed out by Vitruvius :- Non enim de architecturâ sic scribitur ut historiæ aut poemata. Historiæ per se tenent lectores; habent enim novarum rerum varias expectationes; poematicorum vero carminum metra ac pedes, ac verborum elegans dispositio et sententiarum inter personas distinctas, et versuum pronunciatio prolectando sensus legentium perducit sine offensâ ad summam scriptorum terminationem. Id autem in architecturæ conscriptionibus non potest fieri, quod vocabula ex artis propriâ necessitate concepta inconsueto sermone objiciunt sensibus obscuritatem.'-v. præf. § 1, 2.

Ce

(99) Je suis fort porté à croire que ces histoires insipides, qui, ne pouvant être exactes, veulent être minutieuses, ont singulièrement contribué à provoquer et à répandre le goût dangereux des romans. genre, qui avait été presque inconnu avant l'ère Chrétienne, ne se fait remarquer par le nombre et l'étendue de ses productions qu'au cinquième siècle, quand le genre historique achevait de dégénérer. On a composé dans le moyen âge presque autant de romans que de chroniques, comme par compensation; et l'on a continué, depuis le renouvellement des lettres, à se dédommager de récits fastidieux par des récits frivoles. Il est fort à présumer que les progrès que l'art d'écrire l'histoire pourrait faire encore, après ceux qu'il a déjà faits depuis le milieu du siècle dernier, détourneraient des lectures romanesques; et il y aurait à cela un double profit. De manière ou d'autre, il faut que le goût naturel des hommes pour les récits soit satisfait.'-Daunou, ib. tom. vii. p. 347. A similar remark is made by M. de Barante, Hist. des Ducs de Bourgogne, tom. i. pref. p. 24.

able sequences of events, or of using the facts as an illustration and proof of some practical principle.

Many of the dramatic tales and colloquies of remarkable men in Herodotus fall under this description; they are episodes in the main story, heightening its effect; wholly imaginary, or resting on a very slender basis of fact, and embodying some ethical or religious sentiment which the historian desires to exemplify.(100) The Cyropædia of Xenophon is a political romance—a practical exemplification of an ideal government, in which the groundwork of the narrative is formed out of a historical name, and there is a certain truth of local and national colouring; but the events and persons are, in general, imaginary.(10) De Foe's Memoirs of a Cavalier, and his History of the Plague, belong to the same class of compositions; though they doubtless approximate more closely to the truth, and contain more fragments of fact embedded in the fiction than the ancient Persian tale of Xenophon.(102) The Télémaque of Fenelon is a work of a kindred nature, in which the story of the Odyssey is converted to a didactic purpose; though it can scarcely be considered as founded on fact, even by the stoutest defender of the historical character of the Homeric poems.

(100) See the remarks of Hoffmeister, Sittlich-Religiöse Lebensansicht des Herodotus, p. 118, cited by Mr. Grote, vol. v. p. 52, n.

(101) Upon the fictitious character of the Cyropædia, see the observations of Daunou, tom. 8, p. 185, 195, 262, 298, 302, 308. He remarks that Cyrus is the only historical personage in the work; all the other dramatis personæ are fictitious, p. 252. Cyrus ille a Xenophonte, non ad historiæ fidem scriptus, sed ad effigiem justi imperii.'-Cic. ad Q. F. i. 1, § 8. Compare Menage on Diog. Laert. iii. § 34; and Ulrici, Characteristik der Antiken Historiographie, p. 46-7. The story that the words of Plato (Leg. iii. 12, p. 694), as to Cyrus not having had a good education, and not having applied his mind to economy, but being a mere warrior, allude to Xenophon's work, reported by Gellius, N. A. xiv. 3, is (as Boeckh, in Platonis Minoem, p. 181, has remarked) doubtless false; but this view of Cyrus is wholly inconsistent with that taken by Xenophon.

(102) Both the moralists and rhetoricians of ancient times were very apt to treat history, not as a series of true matters of fact, exemplifying the laws of human nature and society, and enlarging our knowledge of them for purposes of future inference; but as if it were a branch of fiction, so to be handled as to please our taste or improve our morality.'-Grote, Hist. of Gr. vol. v. p. 9.

§ 15 A further deviation from the strict truth of history which the ancients permitted themselves, and in which they sometimes assumed a very wide licence of invention, consisted in the introduction of speeches composed by the historian himself. (103) Herodotus has followed this practice to a considerable extent, as may be seen in his debate of the seven Persian conspirators, of the Persian council prior to the invasion of Greece; of Sosicles the Corinthian at the congress in Sparta; of the Greek envoys to Gelo, &c.: he also reports at length supposed conferences held in private between remarkable men, as Crœsus and Solon, Xerxes and Demaratus. (104) The great model, however, of this mode of historical composition was Thucydides, of whose work nearly one fourth consists of speeches. (105) With such illustrious examples before them, it was natural that succeeding historians should continue the practice, and we accordingly meet with speeches in nearly all the classical histories, both of Greece and Rome.

Among the Greeks, there was apparently no reporting of public deliberations: all the original speeches which have been preserved to us, as those of Andocides, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Lysias, &c., were written and published by the orators themselves.(106) Some of them probably were never delivered: and

(103) Upon the introduction of speeches in the ancient histories, see Daunou, Cours d'Etudes Historiques, tom. vii. p. 446-99; Westermann, Geschichte der Beredsamkeit in Griechenland und Rom, vol. i. § 35, n. 13; vol. ii. § 11. Compare a short paper by the Abbé de Vertot, in the Hist. de l'Ac. des Inscript. tom. iii. p. 89.

(104) On the speeches in Herodotus, see Ulrici, p. 38; Vossius, Ars Hist. c. 20. The debate of the seven Persians in Herodotus is rejected as unhistorical by Creuzer, Historische Kunst der Griechen, p. 108. Compare p. 165.

(105) See Meierotto, in the Mém. de l'Acad. de Berlin, 1790-1, p. 523, who states that the thirty-nine speeches of Thucydides occupy 5500 out of 23,900 lines in the edition of Stephens. The eighth book, too, it should be observed, contains no speeches. It appears to have been preserved to us in the first form in which the author composed his history. If he had not been prevented by premature death, or some other cause, he would probably have worked up the eighth book into the same form as the preceding parts of his history, by the insertion of speeches in the recta oratio, and by the further elaboration of certain passages in the narrative.

(106) Cicero says of Athens: 'quâ in urbe primum se orator extulit,

in general, the Greeks, after rhetoric had become an art, were more in the habit of committing their speeches to memory, and of reciting them in the bema, as an actor declaims a speech in a tragedy, than is customary, or indeed possible, in modern times. As the oration was, in general, a carefully written composition, learnt by heart, its subsequent publication by the author himself was easy and natural. With the exception, therefore, of cases where an orator had published his own speech, the Greek historians had no other authority for their accounts of public deliberations than the recollection of persons present on the occasion.(17) Such, too, was the case with the Romans nearly up to the close of the Republic: but at this time the reporting of speeches on special occasions was introduced, (108) and authors of

primumque etiam monumentis et literis oratio est cœpta mandari.' Brut. c. 7. Pericles left no written speech, Plut. Per. 8. The speeches attributed to him, mentioned by Cicero (Brut. 7; De Orat. ii. 22), were doubtless spurious. Antiphon was the first who wrote judicial speeches for others, Plut. Vit. x. Orat. c. 1; Quintilian, iii. i. § 11.

(107) This is all that Thucydides refers to, i. 22. It is a mistake to suppose, with M. Daunou, ib. tom. vii. p. 460, 470; tom. x. p. 56, that he relies upon written reports. Xenophon, indeed, is stated by Diogenes Laertius to have first used short-hand notes, for the purpose of taking down the conversations of Socrates, which he published in his Memorabilia, ii. 48. How far this notice is to be trusted, is uncertain; there is, however, no trace of the use of short-hand writing for the reporting of public speeches in the Greek states.

(108) Short-hand writers (onμecoypapo) are stated to have been employed for the first time by Cicero, to report the debate in the Roman senate on the punishment of the Catilinarian conspirators.-Plutarch, Cat. c. 23.

According to Suetonius, Cæs. c. 55, a speech pro Q. Metello' was attributed to Julius Cæsar, quam non immerito Augustus existimat magis ab actuariis exceptam, male subsequentibus verba dicentis, quam ab ipso editam.' The actuarius was the scribe who registered the acts of a public body; and whose name gradually acquired the sense of reporter. Thus, in Seneca, Epist. xxxiii. § 9- Quid est quare audiam, quod legere possum ? Multum, inquit, viva vox facit. Non quidem hæc, quæ alienis verbis commodatur, et actuarii vice fungitur,' i. e., not a voice which repeats another man's words, and performs only the part of a reporter. See Lipsius, Excurs. ad Tacit. Ann. v.

The original speech in defence of Milo appears to have been preserved from the reporter's notes. The speech now extant was composed afterwards, and was very unlike that actually delivered.-Merivale's History of Rome under the Emperors, vol. i. p. 543. The orations attributed to Sulpicius were, according to Cic. (Brut. 56,) said to have been written after his death by a certain Canutius. It does not appear how the orations of P. Scipio and T. Gracchus, the genuineness of which is doubted by Livy (xxxviii. 56), were preserved. A speech of Appius Cæcus was extant in

the imperial period describe the art of the short-hand writer in terms which would apply to the present day. (109) No connected or complete series of the debates in the senate was, however, ever published at Rome; and the authentic materials at the command of the Roman historian for describing the deliberations of public bodies must have been very scanty.(110)

The closest adherence to historical truth in this matter is perceptible in Thucydides, who probably never represents a speech as having been delivered on an occasion when no speech

Cicero's time.-Brut. 16. Cicero refers to the habit of orators, in his time, omitting to write their speeches until they had been delivered: Nam videmus alios oratores inertiâ nihil scripsisse, ne domesticus etiam labor accederet ad forensem; pleræque enim scribuntur orationes habitæ jam, non ut habeantur.-Brut. 24. Upon the publication of Roman speeches, see Ulrici, ib. p. 115.

For the history of short-hand and secret writing in antiquity, see Carpentier, Alphabetum Tironianum, Paris, 1747, fol., in the preface: also, Hugo, de Scrib. Orig. p. 537; Kopp, Tachygraphia Veterum, Manheim, 1817 and Bernhardy, Röm. Litteratur, p. 66.

Concerning the practice of taking down sermons in short-hand, in the early centuries of the church, see Bingham's Antiquities of the Christian Church, b. xiv. ch. 4, § 29 (vol. iv. p. 608, ed. 1844).

6

Short-hand writing seems never to have become one of the artes deperdita; but it was revived in England in the early part of the seventeenth century, when several manuals of it were published. See Granger's Biog. Dict. vol. i. p. 539; vol. ii. p. 99. The art of short-writing (Granger observes) is in a manner our own; it was very little known or practised at this time [i. e. in the seventeenth century] in any other country.'— Ib. p. 540.

Mr. Rushworth, the clerk-assistant, took down in short-hand the speech which the king made to the House of Commons, when he went to seize the five members. The contents of this speech prove that it was spoken extemporaneously, and not read. Mr. Rushworth afterwards furnished to the king, at his request, a copy of these notes. The expression used is, 'taking his speech in characters.'-Rushworth's Collections, vol. iv. p. 478. The publicity of proceedings, both judicial and parliamentary, doubtless promoted the use of short-hand writing in England; and however much the Gurneys may have perfected this important art, they are the legitimate successors of the official short-hand writers of the seventeenth century.

(109) Quid loquor] verborum notas, quibus quamvis citata excipitur oratio, et celeritatem linguæ manus sequitur?-Seneca, Epist. 90, $26. Martial (xiv. 208) has the following epigram on the notarius, or short-hand writer :

'Currant verba licet, manus est velocior illis ;
Nondum lingua, suum dextra peregit opus.'

(110) The acclamations of the senate, after the death of Commodus, and upon the accession of Alexander Severus, as preserved in the Augustan history, appear to have been derived from the reports of short-hand writers. See Lamprid. Commod. c. 18-20; Alex. Sev. c. 6-12.