Contending parties are very apt to appeal for the truth to records
written by their own side; but nothing is more unfair, and at the same
time insignificant and unconvincing. Such is the partiality of mankind
in favour of themselves and their own actions, that it is almost
impossible to come at any certainty by reading the accounts which are
written on one side only. We have few or no memoirs come down to us of
what was transacted in the world during the sovereignty of ancient Rome,
but what were written by those who had a dependency upon it; therefore
it is no wonder that they appear, upon most occasions, to have been so
great and glorious a nation. What their contemporaries of other
countries thought of them we cannot tell, otherwise than from their own
writers: it is not impossible but they might have described them as a
barbarous, rapacious, treacherous, unpolite people; who, upon their
conquest of Greece, for some time, made as great havoc and destruction
of the arts and sciences, as their fellow plunderers, the Goths and
Vandals, did afterwards in Italy. What monsters would our own
party-zealots make of each other, if the transactions of the times were
to be handed down to posterity by a warm hearty man on either side! and,
were such records to survive two or three centuries, with what
perplexities and difficulties must they embarrass a young historian, as
by turns he consulted them for the characters of his great forefathers!
If it should so happen, it were to be wished this application might be
living at the same time that young readers, instead of doubting to which
they should give their credit, would not fail to remember that this was
the work of a man, that of a lion.