; his elocution easy, persuasive,
and ever at command. He loved peace, but possessed both bravery and
conduct in war; was provident without timidity; severe in the
execution of justice without rigour; and temperate without austerity.
He preserved health, and kept himself from corpulency, to which he was
somewhat inclined, by an abstemious diet and by frequent exercise,
particularly hunting. When he could enjoy leisure, he recreated
himself either in learned conversation or in reading; and he
cultivated his natural talents by study, above any prince of his time.
His affections, as well as his enmities, were warm and durable; and
his long experience of the ingratitude and infidelity of men never
destroyed the natural sensibility of his temper, which disposed him to
friendship and society. His character has been transmitted to us by
several writers who were his contemporaries [e]; and it extremely
resembles, in its most remarkable features, that of his maternal
grandfather Henry I.: excepting only that ambition, which was a ruling
passion in both, found not in the first Henry such unexceptionable
means of exerting itself, and pushed that prince into measures which
were both criminal in themselves, and were the cause of farther
crimes, from which his grandson's conduct was happily exempted.
[FN [e] Petri Bles. epist. 46, 47. in Bibliotheca Patrum, vol. xxiv.
p. 985, 986, &c. Girald. Camb. p. 783, &c.]

[MN Miscellaneous transactions of this reign.]
This prince, like most of his predecessors of the Norman line, except
Stephen, passed more of his time on the continent than in this island:
he was surrounded with the English gentry and nobility, when abroad:
the French gentry and nobility attended him when he resided in
England: both nations acted in the government as if they were the same
people: and, on many occasions, the legislatures seem not to have been
distinguished. As the king and all the English barons were of French
extraction, the manners of that people acquired the ascendant, and
were regarded as the models of imitation. All foreign improvements,
therefore, such as they were, in literature and politeness, in laws
and arts, seem now to have been, in a good measure, transplanted into
England; and that kingdom was become little inferior, in all the
fashionable accomplishments, to any of its neighbours on the
continent. The more homely but more sensible manners and principles
of the Saxons were exchanged for th