History is “natural,” “civil,” “ecclesiastical,” and “literary “; whereof the first three are extant, but the fourth is deficient.  A true history of learning throughout the ages is wanting.  History of Nature is of three sorts—­of Nature in course, of Nature erring or varying, and of Nature altered or worked; that is, history of creatures, history of marvels, and history of arts.  The first of these is extant in good perfection; the two others are handled so weakly that I note them as deficient.  The history of arts is of great use towards natural philosophy such as shall be operative to the benefit of man’s life.  Civil history is of three kinds:  “memorials,” “perfect histories,” and “antiquities,” comparable to unfinished, perfect and defaced pictures.  Just or perfect history represents a time, a person, or an action.  The first we call “chronicles”; the second, “lives”; and the third, “narrations,” or “relations.”

Of modern histories the greater part are beneath mediocrity.  Annals and journals are a kind of history not to be forgotten; and there is also ruminated history, wherein political discourse and observations are mingled with the history of the events themselves.  The history of cosmography is compounded of natural history, civil history, and mathematics.  Ecclesiastical history receives the same divisions with civil history, but may further be divided into history of the Church, history of prophecy, and history of Providence.  The first of these is not deficient, only I would that the sincerity of it were proportionate to its mass and quantity.  The history of prophecy, sorting every prophecy with the event fulfilling the same, is deficient; but the history of Providence, and the notable examples of God’s judgments and deliverances have passed through the labour of many.  Orations, letters, and brief sayings, or apophthegms, are appendices to history.  Thus much concerning history, which answers to memory.

Poetry refers to the imagination.  In respect of its words it is but a character of style, but in respect of its matter it is nothing else but feigned history, which may as well be in prose as in verse.  The use of this feigned history is to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things denies it; poetry serves magnanimity, morality, and delectation.  It is divided into narrative, representative, and allusive or parabolical poetry.  In poetry I can report no deficience; it has sprung up and spread abroad more than any other kind of learning.

In philosophy, the contemplations of man either penetrate unto God, or are circumferred to Nature, or are reflected upon himself; whence arise three knowledges—­divine philosophy, natural philosophy, and human philosophy or humanity.  But it is good to erect one universal science, Philosophia Prima, “primitive” or “summary philosophy,” before we come where the ways part and divide; and this universal