1765.

[T.S.]

SHORT REMARKS ON
BISHOP BURNET'S HISTORY.

This author is in most particulars the worst qualified for an historian
that ever I met with. His style is rough, full of improprieties, in
expressions often Scotch, and often such as are used by the meanest
people.[1] He discovers a great scarcity of words and phrases, by
repeating the same several hundred times, for want of capacity to vary
them. His observations are mean and trite, and very often false. His
secret history is generally made up of coffeehouse scandals, or at best
from reports at the third, fourth, or fifth hand. The account of the
Pretender's birth, would only become an old woman in a chimney-corner.
His vanity runs intolerably through the whole book, affecting to have
been of consequence at nineteen years old, and while he was a little
Scotch parson of forty pounds a year. He was a gentleman born, and, in
the time of his youth and vigour, drew in an old maiden daughter of a
Scotch earl to marry him.[2] His characters are miserably wrought, in
many things mistaken, and all of them detracting,[3] except of those who
were friends to the Presbyterians. That early love of liberty he boasts
of is absolutely false; for the first book that I believe he ever
published is an entire treatise in favour of passive obedience and
absolute power; so that his reflections on the clergy, for asserting,
and then changing those principles, come very improperly from him. He is
the most partial of all writers that ever pretended so much to
impartiality; and yet I, who knew him well, am convinced that he is as
impartial as he could possibly find in his heart; I am sure more than I
ever expected from him; particularly in his accounts of the Papist and
fanatic plots. This work may be more properly called "A History of
Scotland during the Author's Time, with some Digressions relating to
England," rather than deserve the title he gives it. For I believe two
thirds of it relate only to that beggarly nation, and their
insignificant brangles and factions. What he succeeds best in, is in
giving extracts of arguments and debates in council or Parliament.
Nothing recommends his book but the recency of the facts he mentions,
most of them being still in memory, especially the story of the
Revolution; which, however, is not so well told as might be expected
from one who affects to have had so considerable a share in it. After
all, he was a man of generosity and good