lts of his understanding
and temper lie on the surface, and cannot be missed. They were not the
faults which are ordinarily considered as belonging to his country.
Alone among the many Scotchmen who have raised themselves to distinction
and prosperity in England, he had that character which satirists,
novelists, and dramatists have agreed to ascribe to Irish adventurers.
His high animal spirits, his boastfulness, his undissembled vanity,
his propensity to blunder, his provoking indiscretion, his unabashed
audacity, afforded inexhaustible subjects of ridicule to the Tories. Nor
did his enemies omit to compliment him, sometimes with more pleasantry
than delicacy, on the breadth of his shoulders, the thickness of his
calves, and his success in matrimonial projects on amorous and opulent
widows. Yet Burnet, though open in many respects to ridicule, and even
to serious censure, was no contemptible man. His parts were quick, his
industry unwearied, his reading various and most extensive. He was at
once a historian, an antiquary, a theologian, a preacher, a pamphleteer,
a debater, and an active political leader; and in every one of these
characters made himself conspicuous among able competitors. The many
spirited tracts which he wrote on passing events are now known only
to the curious: but his History of his own Times, his History of the
Reformation, his Exposition of the Articles, his Discourse of Pastoral
Care, his Life of Hale, his Life of Wilmot, are still reprinted, nor is
any good private library without them. Against such a fact as this all
the efforts of detractors are vain. A writer, whose voluminous works,
in several branches of literature, find numerous readers a hundred and
thirty years after his death, may have had great faults, but must
also have had great merits: and Burnet had great merits, a fertile and
vigorous mind, and a style, far indeed removed from faultless purity,
but always clear, often lively, and sometimes rising to solemn and
fervid eloquence. In the pulpit the effect of his discourses, which
were delivered without any note, was heightened by a noble figure and
by pathetic action. He was often interrupted by the deep hum of his
audience; and when, after preaching out the hour glass, which in those
days was part of the furniture of the pulpit, he held it up in his hand,
the congregation clamorously encouraged him to go on till the sand had
run off once more. [217] In his moral character, as in his i