or
having ever had experience of that most miserable and detested
condition of living in slavery; no long descent having as yet
invested the Assyrian with a right, nor any other title being
for him pretended than a strong hand; the foolish and effeminate
son of a tyrannous and hated mother could very ill hold so many
great princes and nations his vassals, with a power less
mastering, and a mind less industrious, than his father and
mother had used before him.

It is in passages like this, where we read the satire between the lines,
and in those occasional fragments of autobiography to which we have
already referred in the course of this narrative, that the secondary
charm of the _History of the World_ resides. It is to these that we turn
when we have exhausted our first surprise and delight at the great
bursts of poetic eloquence, the long sonorous sentences which break like
waves on the shore, when the spirit of the historian is roused by some
occasional tempest of reflection. In either case, the book is
essentially one to glean from, not to read with consecutive patience.
Real historical philosophy is absolutely wanting. The author strives to
seem impartial by introducing, in the midst of an account of the
slaughter of the Amalekites, a chapter on 'The Instauration of Civility
in Europe, and of Prometheus and Atlas;' but his general notions of
history are found to be as rude as his comparative mythology. He
scarcely attempts to sift evidence, and next to Inspiration he knows no
guide more trustworthy than Pintus or Haytonus, a Talmudic rabbi or a
Jesuit father. In the midst of his disquisitions, the reward of the
continuous reader is to come suddenly upon an unexpected 'as I myself
have seen in America,' or 'as once befell me also in Ireland.'

Another historical work, the _Breviary of the History of England_, has
been claimed for Sir Walter Raleigh. This book was first published in
1692, from a manuscript in the possession of Archbishop Sancroft, and,
as it would appear, in Raleigh's handwriting. Before its publication,
however, the Archbishop had noted that 'Samuel Daniel hath inserted into
his _History of England_ [1618], almost word for word, both the
Introduction and the Life; whence it is that you have sometimes in the
margin of my copy a various reading with "D" after it.' Daniel, a gentle
and subservient creature, was the friend of Camden, and a paid servant
of Queen Anne, dur