ent, we scarcely can
suppose the proficiency to have been small, where the love and admiration
were so great.

History was cultivated amongst the Romans during the present period, with
uncommon success. This species of composition is calculated both for
information and entertainment; but the chief design of it is to record
all transactions relative to the public, for the purpose of enabling
mankind to draw from past events a probable conjecture concerning the
future; and, by knowing the steps which have led either to prosperity or
misfortune, to ascertain the best means of promoting the former, and
avoiding the latter of those objects. This useful kind of narrative was
introduced about five hundred years before by Herodotus, who has thence
received the appellation of the Father of History. His style, in
conformity to the habits of thinking, and the simplicity of language, in
an uncultivated age, is plain and unadorned; yet, by the happy modulation
of the Ionic dialect, it gratified the ear, and afforded to the states of
Greece a pleasing mixture of entertainment, enriched not only with
various information, often indeed fabulous or unauthentic, but with the
rudiments, indirectly interspersed, of political wisdom. This writer,
after a long interval, was succeeded by Thucydides and Xenophon, the
former of whom carried historical narrative to the highest degree of
improvement it ever attained among the States of Greece. The plan of
Thucydides seems to have continued to be the model of historical
narrative to the writers of Rome; but the circumstances of the times,
aided perhaps by the splendid exertion of genius in other departments of
literature, suggested a new resource, which promised not only to animate,
but embellish the future productions of the historic Muse. This
innovation consisted in an attempt to penetrate the human heart, and
explore in its innermost recesses the sentiments and secret motives which
actuate the conduct of men. By connecting moral effects with their
probable internal and external causes, it tended to establish a
systematic consistency in the concatenation of transactions apparently
anomalous, accidental, or totally independent of each other.

The author of this improvement in history was SALLUST, who likewise
introduced the method of enlivening narrative with the occasional aid of
rhetorical declamation, particularly in his account of the Catilinian
conspiracy. The notorious (160) charac