"
Raleigh begins his great book with the Creation and brings it
down to the third Macedonian war, which ended in 168 B.C. So you
see he did not get far. But although when he began he had
intended to write much more, he never meant to bring his history
down to his own time. "I know that it will be said by many," he
writes in his preface, "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."
Raleigh feels it much safer to write "of the elder times." But
even so, he says there may be people who will think "that in
speaking of the past I point at the present," and that under the
names of those long dead he is showing the vices of people who
are alive. "But this I cannot help though innocent," he says.
Raleigh's fears were not without ground and at one time his
history was forbidden by King James "for being too saucy in
censuring princes.
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