in his prolific writings--is
lordship was something of a misanthropist. It was, in fact, his
misanthropy which drove him, as it has driven many another, to
authorship. He takes up the pen, not so much that he may carry out his
professed object of writing a chronicle of his own time, but to the
end that he may vent the bitterness engendered in him by his fall from
favour. As a consequence he has little that is good to say of anyone,
and rarely mentions one of his contemporaries but to tap the sources of
a picturesque invective. After all, it is possible to make excuses for
him. He was at once a man of thought and a man of action--a combination
as rare as it is usually deplorable. The man of action in him might have
gone far had he not been ruined at the outset by the man of thought. A
magnificent seaman, he might have become Lord High Admiral of England
but for a certain proneness to intrigue. Fortunately for him--since
head where nature had placed it--he came betimes under a cloud of
suspicion. His career suffered a check; but it was necessary to afford
him some compensation since, after all, the suspicions could not be
substantiated.

Consequently he was removed from his command and appointed by the
Queen's Grace her Lieutenant of Cornwall, a position in which it was
judged that he could do little mischief. There, soured by this blighting
of his ambitions, and living a life of comparative seclusion, he turned,
as so many other men similarly placed have turned, to seek consolation
in his pen. He wrote his singularly crabbed, narrow and superficial
History of Lord Henry Goade: his own Times--which is a miracle of
injuvenations, distortions, misrepresentations, and eccentric spelling.
In the eighteen enormous folio volumes, which he filled with his minute
and gothic characters, he gives his own version of the story of what
he terms his downfall, and, having, notwithstanding his prolixity,
exhausted this subject in the first five of the eighteen tomes, he
proceeds to deal with so much of the history of his own day as came
immediately under his notice in his Cornish retirement.

For the purposes of English history his chronicles are entirely
negligible, which is the reason why they have been allowed to remain
unpublished and in oblivion. But to the student who attempts to follow
the history of that extraordinary man, Sir Oliver Tressilian, they are
entirely invaluable. And, since I have made this history my present
task,