But _why_
had they been unpublished? Simply because scandalous and defamatory:
and hence, from the interest which invested the case of an imperial
court so remarkable, this oblique, secondary and purely accidental
modification of the word came to influence its _general_ acceptation.
Simply to have been previously unpublished, no longer raised any
statement into an anecdote: it now received a new integration
it must be some fresh publication of _personal_ memorabilia; and
these having reference to _human_ creatures, must always be
presumed to involve more evil than good--much defamation
true or false--much doubtful insinuation--much suggestion of things
worse than could be openly affirmed. So arose the word: but the
_thing_ arose with Suetonius, that dear, excellent and hard-
working 'father of lies.'] is what the learned call an _excursus_,
and, I am afraid, too long by half; not strictly in proportion. But
don't mind _that_. I'll make it all right by being too short upon
something else, at the next opportunity; and then nobody can complain.
Meantime, I argue, that as all brilliant or epigrammatic anecdotes are
probably false, (a thing that hereafter I shall have much pleasure in
making out to the angry reader's satisfaction,) but to a dead certainty
those anecdotes, in particular, which bear marks in their construction
that a rhetorical effect of art had been contemplated by the narrator,
--we may take for granted, that the current stories ascribing modern
wars (French and English) to accidents the most inconsiderable, are
false even in a literal sense; but at all events they are so when
valued philosophically, and brought out into their circumstantial
relations.
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