I have already been over-long, to make any large discourse either of the parts of the following story, or in mine own excuse:  especially in the excuse of this or that passage; seeing the whole is exceeding weak and defective.  Among the grossest, the unsuitable division of the books, I could not know how to excuse, had I not been directed to enlarge the building after the foundation was laid, and the first part finished.  All men know that there is no great art in the dividing evenly of these things, which are subject to number and measure.  For the rest, it suits well enough with a great many books of this age, which speak too much, and yet say little; “Ipsi nobis furto subducimur”; “We are stolen away from ourselves,” setting a high price on all that is our own.  But hereof, though a late good writer make complaint, yet shall it not lay hold on me, because I believe as he doth; that who so thinks himself the wisest man, is but a poor and miserable ignorant.  Those that are the best men of war against all the vanities and fooleries of the world, do always keep the strongest guards against themselves, to defend them from themselves; from self-love, self-estimation, and self-opinion.

Generally concerning the order of the work, I have only taken counsel from the argument.  For of the Assyrians, which after the downfall of Babel take up the first part, and were the first great kings of the world, there came little to the view of posterity:  some few enterprises, greater in fame than faith, of Ninus and Semiramis, excepted.

It was the story of the Hebrews, of all before the Olympiads, that overcame the consuming disease of time, and preserved itself, from the very cradle and beginning to this day:  and yet not so entire, but that the large discourses thereof (to which in many Scriptures we are referred) are nowhere found.  The fragments of other stories, with the actions of those kings and princes which shot up here and there in the same time, I am driven to relate by way of digression:  of which we may say with Virgil:  “Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto”; “They appear here and there floating in the great gulf of time.”

To the same first ages do belong the report of many inventions therein found, and from them derived to us; though most of the authors’ names have perished in so long a navigation.  For those ages had their laws; they had diversity of government; they had kingly rule; nobility; policy in war; navigation, and all, or the most of needful trades.  To speak therefore of these (seeing in a general history we should have left a great deal of nakedness, by their omission) it cannot properly be called a digression.  True it is, that I have made also many others:  which if they shall be laid to my charge, I must cast the fault into the great heap of human error.  For seeing we digress in all the ways of our lives:  yea, seeing the life of man is nothing else but digression; I may the better be excused, in writing their lives and actions.  I am not altogether ignorant in the laws of history and of the kinds.