A reader of acumen and critical faculty following a writer in an inquiry of this nature places himself in the position of a lawyer who will not accept the interpretation of an Act of Parliament, or even a clause in it, as correct, except,—as his phrase goes,—it "runs upon all fours:" he knows that it is with a speculation in a literary matter as with a chapter of a statute: he struggles to raise only a single valid objection against what is advanced: if successful he at one destroys the whole of the theory, from thus exposing it to view as not "running upon all fours;" the fabric is, in fact, discovered to be reared on a false foundation; it must, therefore, fall as at the slightest breath a child's house built of cards; and the theory becomes one more added to the list of those that are apocryphal. If on examination it should be agreed that the theory in this book is without a flaw, I conceived that I shall have done not a small, but a considerable service to the cause of true history.
LONDON, April 3, 1878.
CONTENTS.
BOOK THE FIRST.
TACITUS.
CHAPTER I.
TACITUS COULD BARELY HAVE WRITTEN THE ANNALS.
I. From the chronological point of view.
II. The silence preserved about that work by all writers till
the fifteenth century.
III. The age of the MSS. containing the Annals.