and at the same time incurred the hatred of the people. In 1667
he was accused of high treason, and made his escape to France. Neglected
by his master, ignored by the French monarch, he wandered about in France,
from time to time petitioning his king to permit him to return and die in
England, but without success. Seven years of exile, which he reminded the
king "was a time prescribed and limited by God himself for the expiation
of some of his greatest judgments," passed by, and the ex-chancellor died
at Rouen. He had begun his history in exile as the faithful servant of a
dethroned prince; he ended it in exile, as the cast-off servant of an
ungrateful monarch. As a writer of contemporary history, Clarendon has
given us the form and color of the time. The book is in title and handling
a Royalist history. Its faults are manifest: first those of partisanship;
and secondly, those which spring from his absence, so that much of the
work was written without an observant knowledge. His delineation of
character is wonderful: the men of the times are more pictorially
displayed than in the portraits of Van Dyk. The style is somewhat too
pompous, being more that of the orator than of the historian, and
containing long and parenthetic periods. Sir Walter Scott says: "His
characters may match those of the ancient historians, and one thinks he
would know the very men if he were to meet them in society." Macaulay
concedes to him a strong sense of moral and religious obligation, a
sincere reverence for the laws of his country, and a conscientious regard
for the honor and interests of the crown; but adds that "his temper was
sour, arrogant, and impatient of opposition." No one can rightly
understand the great rebellion without reading Clarendon's history of it.

CHAPTER XXI.

DRYDEN, AND THE RESTORED STUARTS.

The Court of Charles II. Dryden's Early Life. The Death of Cromwell.
The Restoration. Dryden's Tribute. Annus Mirabilis. Absalom and
Achitophel. The Death of Charles. Dryden's Conversion. Dryden's Fall.
His Odes.

THE COURT OF CHARLES II.

The antithetic literature which takes its coloring from the great
rebellion, was now to give place to new forms not immediately connected
with it, but incident to the Restoration. Puritanism was now to be
oppressed, and the country was to be governed, under a show of
constitutional right, more arbitrarily than ever before. The moral
rebound, too, was tremendous; th