ruct, or to please and instruct at the same time, history was a
branch of literature: there were not too many scruples on the score of
proofs; those who worked from written documents took no care to
distinguish the text of such documents from their own text; in
reproducing the narratives of their predecessors they adorned them with
details, and sometimes (under pretext of being precise) with numbers,
with speeches, with reflections, and elegances. We can in a manner see
them at work in every instance where it is possible to compare Greek and
Roman historians, Ephorus and Livy, for example, with their sources.

The writers of the Renaissance directly imitated the ancients. For them,
too, history was a literary art with apologetic aims or didactic
pretensions. In Italy it was too often a means of gaining the favour of
princes, or a theme for declamations. This state of affairs lasted a
long time. Even in the seventeenth century we find, in Mezeray, an
historian of the ancient classical pattern.

However, in the historical literature of the Renaissance, two novelties
claim our attention, in which the mediaeval influence is incontrovertibly
manifest. On the one hand we see the retention of a form of exposition
which was unusual in antiquity, which was created by the Catholic
historians of the later ages (Eusebius, Orosius), and which enjoyed
great favour in the Middle Ages,--that which, instead of embracing only
the history of a single man, family, or people, embraces universal
history. On the other hand there was introduced a mechanical artifice of
exposition, having its origin in a practice common in the mediaeval
schools (the gloss), which had far-reaching consequences. The custom
arose of adding notes to printed books of history.[217] Notes have made
it possible to distinguish between the historical narrative and the
documents which support it, to give references to sources, to
disencumber and illustrate the text. It was in collections of documents,
and in critical dissertations, that the artifice of annotation was first
employed; thence it penetrated, slowly, into historical works of other
classes.

A second period begins in the eighteenth century. The "philosophers"
then began to conceive history as the study, not of events for their own
sakes, but of the habits of men. They were thus led to take an interest,
not only in facts of a political order, but in the evolution of the
arts, the sciences, of industry, and in