When the poet Milton sat down to write the history of that part of
Britain now called England, as he expressed it, he said: "The beginning
of nations, those excepted of whom sacred books have spoken, is to this
day unknown. Nor only the beginning, but the deeds also of many
succeeding ages, yes, periods of ages, either wholly unknown or
obscured or blemished with fables." Why this is so the great poet did
not pretend to tell, but he thought that it might be because people did
not know how to write in the first ages, or because their records had
been lost in wars and by the sloth and ignorance that followed them.
Perhaps men did not think that the records of their own times were
worth preserving when they reflected how base and corrupt, how petty
and perverse such deeds would appear to those who should come after
them. For whatever reason, Milton said that it had come about that some
of the stories that seemed to be the oldest were in his day regarded as
fables; but that he did not intend to pass them over, because that
which one antiquary admitted as true history, another exploded as mere
fiction, and narratives that had been once called fables were afterward
found to "contain in them many footsteps and reliques of something
true," as what might be read in poets "of the flood and giants, little
believed, till undoubted witnesses taught us that all was not feigned."
For such reasons Milton determined to tell over the old stories, if for
no other purpose than that they might be of service to the poets and
romancers who knew how to use them judiciously. He said that he did not
intend even to stop to argue and debate disputed questions, but,
"imploring divine assistance," to relate, "with plain and lightsome
brevity," those things worth noting.

After all this preparation Milton began his history of England at the
Flood, hastily recounted the facts to the time of the great Trojan war,
and then said that he had arrived at a period when the narrative could