[Footnote 5: Roger Ascham in his _Scholemaster_ divides History into 'Diaria', 'Annales', 'Commentaries', and 'Iustam Historiam'.] [Footnote 6: Bacon told Queen Elizabeth that there was no treason in Hayward's _Henry IV_, but 'very much felony', because Hayward 'had stolen many of his sentences and conceits out of Cornelius Tacitus' (_Apophthegms_, 58). Hayward and Bacon had a precursor in the author of _The History of King Richard the Thirde_, generally attributed to Sir Thomas More, and printed in the collection of his works published in 1557. It was known to the chroniclers, but it did not affect the writing of history. Nor did George Cavendish's _Life and Death of Thomas Wolsey_, which they likewise used for its facts.] [Footnote 7: C.H. Firth, 'Burnet as a Historian', in Clarke and Foxcroft's _Life of Gilbert Burnet_, 1907, pp. xliv, xlv.] II. The Literary Models. The authentic models for historical composition were in Greek and Latin. Much as our literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries owed to the classics, the debt was nowhere more obvious, and more fully acknowledged, than in our histories. The number of translations is in itself remarkable. Many of them, and notably the greatest of all, North's Plutarch, belong to the early part of Elizabeth's reign, but they became more frequent at the very time when the inferiority of our native works was engaging attention.[1] By the middle of the seventeenth century the great classical historians could all be read in English. It was not through translation, however, that their influence was chiefly exercised.