epitomist

Updated: May 17, 2025

Shakespeare's whole mode of procedure finds something unaccommodating in the actual stage; his great talent is that of an epitomist, and since poets are, on the whole, epitomists of Nature, we must here, too, acknowledge Shakespeare's great merit; only we deny, at the same time, and that to his credit, that the stage was a worthy sphere for his genius.

- The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 02 : Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English. in Twenty Volumes

A history which aspires to traverse long periods of time, or to be universal, must indeed forego the attempt to give individual representations of the past as it actually existed. It must foreshorten its pictures by abstractions, and this includes not merely the omission of events and deeds, but whatever is involved in the fact that Thought is, after all, the most trenchant epitomist.

Various - The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 07 : Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English. in Twenty Volumes

It will be remembered that Bracciolini recovered the work of Ammianus Marcellinus: it is then reasonable to presume that he had read, if not studied his history. Tacitus lived a good three hundred years before that historical epitomist of not much note or weight; and could not, on his authority, have been dragged, like his "discoverer" and student, Bracciolini, into this monstrous error.

John Wilson Ross - Tacitus and Bracciolini : The Annals Forged in the XVth Century