e political
consequences which followed their neglect. Charles II., who was no
admirer of these regulated formalities of court etiquette, seems to have
broken up the pomp and pride of the former master of the ceremonies; and
the grave and great chancellor of human nature, as Warburton calls
Clarendon, censured and felt all the inconveniences of this open
intercourse of an ambassador with the king. Thus he observed in the case
of the Spanish ambassador, who, he writes, "took the advantage of the
license of the court, where no rules or formalities were yet established
(and to which the king himself was not enough inclined), but all doors
open to all persons; which the ambassador finding, he made himself a
domestic, came to the king at all hours, and spake to him when, and as
long as he would, without any ceremony, or _desiring an audience
according to the old custom_; but came into the bed-chamber while the
king was dressing himself, and mingled in all discourses with the same
freedom he would use in his own. And from this never-heard-of license,
introduced by the _French_ and the _Spaniard at this time, without any
dislike in the king, though not permitted in any court in Christendom_,
many inconveniences and mischiefs broke in, which could never after be
shut out."[101]

DIARIES--MORAL, HISTORICAL, AND CRITICAL.

We converse with the absent by letters, and with ourselves by diaries;
but vanity is more gratified by dedicating its time to the little
labours which have a chance of immediate notice, and may circulate from
hand to hand, than by the honester pages of a volume reserved only for
solitary contemplation; or to be a future relic of ourselves, when we
shall no more hear of ourselves.

Marcus Antoninus's celebrated work entitled [Greek: Ton eis eauton, _Of
the things which concern himself_, would be a good definition of the
use and purpose of a diary. Shaftesbury calls a diary, "A fault-book,"
intended for self-correction; and a Colonel Harwood, in the reign of
Charles the First, kept a diary, which, in the spirit of the times, he
entitled "Slips, Infirmities, and Passages of Providence." Such a diary
is a moral instrument, should the writer exercise it on himself, and on
all around him. Men then wrote folios concerning themselves; and it
sometimes happened, as proved by many, which I have examined in
manuscript, that often writing in retirement, they would write when
they had nothing to write.

Diaries