s.

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