The same hath been taught by many, but no man better, and with greater brevity, than by that excellent learned gentleman, Sir Francis Bacon.  Christian laws are also taught us by the prophets and apostles; and every day preached unto us.  But we still make large digressions:  yea, the teachers themselves do not (in all) keep the path which they point out to others.

For the rest, after such time as the Persians had wrested the Empire from the Chaldeans, and had raised a great monarchy, producing actions of more importance than were elsewhere to be found; it was agreeable to the order of the story, to attend this Empire; whilst it so flourished, that the affairs of the nations adjoining had reference thereunto.  The like observance was to be used towards the fortunes of Greece, when they again began to get ground upon the Persians; as also towards the affairs of Rome, when the Romans grew more mighty than the Greeks.

As for the Medes, the Macedonians, the Sicilians, the Carthaginians, and other nations who resisted the beginnings of the former empires, and afterwards became but parts of their composition and enlargement; it seemed best to remember what was known of them from their several beginnings, in such times and places as they in their flourishing estates opposed those monarchies, which in the end swallowed them up.  And herein I have followed the best geographers:  who seldom give names to those small brooks, whereof many, joined together, make great rivers:  till such times as they become united, and run in main stream to the ocean sea.  If the phrase be weak, and the style not everywhere like itself:  the first shows their legitimation and true parent; the second will excuse itself upon the variety of matter.  For Virgil, who wrote his Eclogues, “gracili avena,"[42] used stronger pipes, when he sounded the wars of Aeneas.  It may also be laid to my charge, that I use divers Hebrew words in my first book, and elsewhere:  in which language others may think and I myself acknowledge it, that I am altogether ignorant:  but it is true, that some of them I find in Montanus, others in Latin characters in S. Senensis; and of the rest I have borrowed the interpretation of some of my friends.  But say I had been beholding to neither, yet were it not to be wondered at, having had an eleven years’ leisure, to attain the knowledge of that, or of any other tongue; howsoever, I know that it will be said by many, that I might have been more pleasing to the reader, if I had written the story of mine own times, having been permitted to draw water as near the well-head as another.  To this I answer, that whosoever in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.  There is no mistress or guide, that hath led her followers and servants into greater miseries.  He that goes after her too far off, loseth her sight, and loseth himself:  and he that walks after her at a middle distance: