implies an ignorance alike of the ends and meaning of history, which, considering that he was living in the midst of a singular revival of historical study, is not easy to pardon.  If we are to look only to perfection of form and arrangement, it may have been right for one living in the middle of the last century to place the ancients in the first rank without competitors.  But the author of the Discourse upon literature and the arts might have been expected to look beyond composition, and the contemporary of Voltaire’s Essai sur les Moeurs (1754-1757) might have been expected to know that the profitable experience of the human race did not close with the fall of the Roman republic.  Among the ancient historians, he counted Thucydides to be the true model, because he reports facts without judging, and omits none of the circumstances proper for enabling us to judge of them for ourselves—­though how Rousseau knew what facts Thucydides has omitted, I am unable to divine.  Then come Caesar’s Commentaries and Xenophon’s Retreat of the Ten Thousand.  The good Herodotus, without portraits and without maxims, but abounding in details the most capable of interesting and pleasing, would perhaps be the best of historians, if only these details did not so often degenerate into puerilities.  Livy is unsuited to youth, because he is political and a rhetorician.  Tacitus is the book of the old; you must have learnt the art of reading facts, before you can be trusted with maxims.

The drawback of histories such as those of Thucydides and Caesar, Rousseau admits to be that they dwell almost entirely on war, leaving out the true life of nations, which belongs to the unwritten chronicles of peace.  This leads him to the equally just reflection that historians while recounting facts omit the gradual and progressive causes which led to them.  “They often find in a battle lost or won the reason of a revolution, which even before the battle was already inevitable.  War scarcely does more than bring into full light events determined by moral causes, which historians can seldom penetrate."[316] A third complaint against the study which he began by recommending as a proper introduction to the knowledge of man, is that it does not present men but actions, or at least men only in their parade costume and in certain chosen moments, and he justly reproaches writers alike of history and biography, for omitting those trifling strokes and homely anecdotes, which reveal the true physiognomy of character.  “Remain then for ever, without bowels, without nature; harden your hearts of cast iron in your trumpery decency, and make yourselves despicable by force of dignity."[317] And so after all, by a common stroke of impetuous inconsistency, he forsakes history, and falls back upon the ancient biographies, because, all the low and familiar details being banished from modern style, however true and characteristic, men are as elaborately tricked out by our authors in their private lives as they were tricked out upon the stage of the world.