; but did not produce any
accomplished historian. Clarendon, however, will always be esteemed an
entertaining writer, even independent of our curiosity to know the facts
which he relates. His style is prolix and redundant, and suffocates
us by the length of its periods: but it discovers imagination and
sentiment, and pleases us at the same time that we disapprove of it. He
is more partial in appearance than in reality for he seems perpetually
anxious to apologize for the king; but his apologies are often well
grounded. He is less partial in his relation of facts, than in his
account of characters: he was too honest a man to falsify the former;
his affections were easily capable, unknown to himself, of disguising
the latter. An air of probity and goodness runs through the whole
work; as these qualities did in reality embellish the whole life of the
author. He died in 1674, aged sixty-six.

These are the chief performances which engage the attention of
posterity. Those numberless productions with which the press then
abounded; the cant of the pulpit, the declamations of party, the
subtilties of theology, all these have long ago sunk in silence and
oblivion. Even a writer such as Selden, whose learning was his chief
excellency, or Chillingworth, an acute disputant against the Papists,
will scarcely be ranked among the classics of our language or country.

NOTES

[Footnote 1: NOTE A, p. 15. By a speech of Sir Simon D'Ewes, in the
first year of the long parliament, it clearly appears, that the nation
never had, even to that time, been rightly informed concerning the
transactions of the Spanish negotiation, and still believed the court
of Madrid to have been altogether insincere in their professions. What
reason, upon that supposition, had they to blame either the prince or
Buckingham for their conduct, or for the narrative delivered to the
parliament? This is a capital fact, and ought to be well attended to.
D'Ewes's speech is in Nalson, vol. ii. p. 368. No author or historian of
that age mentions the discovery of Buckingham's impostures as a cause of
disgust in the parliament. Whitlocke (p. 1) only says, that the commons
began to suspect, that it had been spleen in Buckingham, not zeal for
public good, which had induced him to break the Spanish match; a clear
proof that his falsehood was not suspected. Wilson (p. 780) says, that
Buckingham lost his popularity after Bristol arrived, not because that
nobleman disco