You will allow that what I have said in these few pages is very easily learned; yet, little as it is, I will venture to say that, was you as perfectly mistress of it as of your alphabet, you might answer several questions relating to ancient chronology more readily than many who pretend to know something of this science. One is not so much required to tell the precise year, in which a great man lived, as to know, with whom he was contemporary in other parts of the world. I would know then, from the slight sketch above given, about what year of the Roman republic Alexander the Great lived. You would quickly run over in your mind, "Alexander lived in the 3670th year of the world, 330 before Christ; consequently he must have flourished about the 400th _of Rome_, which had endured 750 years when Christ was born." Or, suppose it was asked, what was the condition of Greece, at the time of the sacking of Rome by the Gauls; had any particular state, or the united body, chosen then to take advantage of the misfortunes of the Romans? You consider that the 365th year of the city--the date of that event---is 385 before Christ; consequently this must have happened about the time of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander, when the Grecians under such a leader might have extirpated the Roman nation from the earth, had they ever heard of them, or thought the conquest of them an object worthy their ambition. Numberless questions might be answered in like manner, even on this very narrow circumscribed plan, if it was completely mastered. I might require that other periods or epochas should be learned with the same exactness; but these may serve to explain my meaning, and to show you how practicable and easy it is. One thing, however, I must observe--though perhaps it is sufficiently obvious--which is, that you can make no use of this sketch of ancient Chronology, nor even hope to retain it, till you have read the ancient _history_. When you have gone through Rollin's Histoire Ancienne _once_, then will be the time to fix the ancient Chronology deep in your mind, which will very much enhance the pleasure and use of reading it a _second_ time; for you must remember, that nobody reads a history to much purpose, who does not go over it more than once. When you have got through your course of ancient history, and are come to the more modern, you must then have recourse to the second of the three divisions; viz. _middle Chronology_: containing about 800 years, from the birth of our Lord, and from within 50 years of the rise of the Roman empire, to Charlemagne, who died in 814. This period, except in the earliest part of it, is too much involved in obscurity to require a very minute knowledge of its history: it may be sufficient to fix two or three of the most singular circumstances by their proper dates.