_In part_ we say, because in part also the characteristic differences
of these works depend upon the particular mode of the narrative. For
narration itself, as applied to history, admits of a triple
arrangement--dogmatic, sceptical, and critical; dogmatic, which adopts
the current records without examination; sceptical, as Horace Walpole's
Richard III., Laing's Dissertation on Perkin Warbeck, or on the Gowrie
Conspiracy, which expressly undertakes to probe and try the unsound
parts of the story; and critical, which, after an examination of this
nature, selects from the whole body of materials such as are coherent.
There is besides another ground of difference in the quality of
historical narratives, viz. between those which move by means of great
public events, and those which (like the Caesars of Suetonius, and the
French Memoirs), referring to such events as are already known, and
keeping them in the background, crowd their foreground with those
personal and domestic notices which we call anecdotes.