lourings are of the essence of the art of the
prose writer, Clarendon may seem tame and jejune. He is in reality just the
contrary. His wood is tough enough and close-grained enough, but there is
plenty of sap coursing through it. In yet a third respect, which is less
closely connected with the purely formal aspect of style, Clarendon stands,
if not pre-eminent, very high among historians. This is his union of acute
penetration and vigorous grasp in the treatment of complicated events. It
has been hinted that he seems to have somewhat lost grasp, if not
penetration, after the Restoration. But at the time of his earlier
participation in public affairs, and of his composition of the greater part
of his historical writings, he was in the very vigour and prime of life;
and though it may be that he was "a Janus of one face," and looked rather
backward than forward, even then he was profoundly acquainted with the
facts of English history, with the character of his countrymen, and with
the relations of events as they happened. It may even be contended by those
who care for might-have-beens, that but for the headlong revolt against
Puritanism, which inspired the majority of the nation with a kind of
carnival madness for many years after 1660, and the strange deficiency of
statesmen of even moderately respectable character on both sides (except
Clarendon himself, and the fairly upright though time-serving Temple, there
is hardly a respectable man to be found on any side of politics for forty
years), Clarendon's post-Restoration policy itself would not have been the
failure that it was. But it is certain that on the events of his own middle
age he looked with the keenest discernment, and with the widest
comprehension.

Against these great merits must be set a treble portion of the great defect
which, as we have said, vitiates all the English prose work of his time,
the unconscious or wilful ignoring of the very fundamental principles of
sentence-and paragraph-architecture. His mere syntax, in the most
restricted sense of that word, is not very bad; he seldom indulges out of
mere _incuria_ in false concords or blunders over a relative. But he is the
most offending soul alive at any time in English literature in one grave
point. No one has put together, or, to adopt a more expressive phrase,
heaped together such enormous paragraphs; no one has linked clause on
clause, parenthesis on parenthesis, epexegesis on exegesis, in such a
bew