Naturalistic or cosmological romances will always be composed by those who feel inspired to write them, and they will always find eager and appreciative readers, especially among the lazy, who are pleased to possess the 'secret of the world' in a few pages. And more or less vast compilations will always be made of the histories of the East and the West, of the Americas and Africa and Oceania. The strength of a single individual does not suffice for these, even as regards their compilation, so we now find groups of learned men or compilers associated in that object (as though to give ocular evidence of the absence of all intimate connexion). We have even seen recently certain attempts at universal histories arranged on geographical principles, like so many histories set side by side--European, Asiatic, African, and so on--which insensibly assume the form of a historical dictionary. And this or that particular history can always usefully take the name of a 'universal history,' in the old sense of Polybius--that is to say, as opposed to books that are less actual, less serious, and less satisfactory, the books of those 'writers of particular things' (οἱ τάς ἐπί μέρους γράφοντες πράξεις) who are led to make little things great (τὰ μικρὰ μεγάλα ποιεῑν) and to indulge in lengthy anecdotes unworthy of being recorded (περὶ τῶν μηδὲ μνήμης άξιων), and that owing to the lack of a criterion (δί' ἀκρισίαν). In this sense, those times and peoples whose politico-social development had produced, as it were, a narrowing of the historical circle would be well advised to break away from minute details and to envisage 'universal history'--that is to say, a vaster history, which lies beyond particular histories. This applies in particular to our Italy, which, since it had a universalistic function at the time of the Renaissance, had universal vision, and told the history of all the peoples in its own way, and then limited itself to local history, then again elevated itself to national history, and should now, even more than in the past, extend itself over the vast fields of the history of all times past and present. But the word 'universal,' which has value for the ends above mentioned, will never designate the possession of a 'universal history,' in the sense that we have refused to it. Such a history disappears in the world of illusions, together with similar Utopias, such, for instance, as the art that should serve as model for all times, or universal justice valid for all time. III