EDWARD HYDE,

EARL OF CLARENDON,

FOR his comprehensive knowledge of mankind, styled The Chancellor of Human Nature. His character, at this distance of time, may, ought to be impartially considered. His designing or blinded cotemporaries heaped the most unjust abuse upon him; the subsequent age, when the partizans of prerogative were at least the loudest, if not the most numerous, smit with a work that deified their martyr, have been unbounded in their encomiums. We shall steer a middle course, and separate his great virtues, which have not been the foundation of his fame, from his faults as an historian, the real sources of it.3

Of all modern virtues, patriotism has stood the test the worst. The great Strafford, with the eloquence of Tully and the heroism of Epaminondas, had none of the steadiness of

2 Vide Critical and Philosophical Inquiry into the Causes of Prodigies and Miracles, as related by Historians, quoted in Gen. Dict. vol. vi. p. 341. [Published by Warburton, but without his name, in 1727, 12mo. Dr. Lort.]

[See a vindication of the noble historian from lord Orford's censures, in Remarks on this Catalogue, p. 23.]

the latter. Hampden, less stained, cannot but be suspected of covering ambitious thoughts with the mantle of popular virtue. — In the partition of employments on a treaty with the king, his contenting himself with asking the post of governor to the prince, seems to me to have had at least as deep a tincture of selfinterestedness as my lord Strafford had, who strode at once from demagogue to primeminister. Sir Edward Hyde, who opposed an arbitrary court, and embraced the party of an afflicted one, must be allowd to have acted conscientiously. A better proof was his behaviour on the Restoration, when the torrent of an infatuated nation entreated the king and his minister to be absolute. Had Clarendon sought nothing but power, his power had never ceased. A corrupted court and a blinded populace, were less the causes of the chancellor's fall, than an ungrateful king, who could not pardon his lordship's having refused to accept for him the slavery of his country. In this light my lord Clarendon was more "The Chancellor of Human Nature," than from his knowledge of it. Like justice itself he held the balance between the necessary power of the supreme magistrate and the interests of the people. This never-dying obli

gation his cotemporaries were taught to overlook and to clamour against, till they removed the only man, who, if he could, would have corrected his master's evil government. One reads with indignation, that buffooneries too low and insipid for Bartholomew-fair, were practised in a court called polite, to make a silly man of wit laugh himself into disgracing the only honest minister he had. Buckingham, Shaftsbury, Lauderdale, Arlington, and such abominable men, were the exchange which the nation made for my lord Clarendon ! It should not be forgot that sir Edward Seymour carried up the charge against him, and that the earl of Bristol had before attempted his ruin, by accusing him of being at once an enemy and a friend to the Papists. His sonin-law did not think him the latter, or he

+ [Wood seems to have imbibed a virulent aversion to lord Clarendon, and registered him as "a corrupt judge” in the Athenæ; whence he suffered condemnation in the chancellor's court of the University of Oxford, for libelling the lord-chancellor of England and chancellor of Oxford; and was banished the said university, until he should subscribe a public recantation, and give security not to offend in the like nature for the future. His said book was also decreed to be burned before the public theatre, and on July 31. 1693, was burned accordingly; and programmas of his expulsion were affixed in the usual places. See London Gazette, Aug. 3. 1693.}

5 The duke of York.

would have interposed more warmly in his behalf.

These I have mentioned, and almost every virtue of a minister, make his character venerable. As an historian he seems more exceptionable. His majesty and eloquence, his power of painting characters, his knowledge of his subject, rank him in the first class of writers yet he has both great and little faults. Of the latter, his stories of ghosts and omens are not to be defended, by supposing he did not believe them himself: there can be no other reason for inserting them; nor is there any medium between believing and laughing at them. Perhaps even his favourite character of lord Falkland takes too considerable a share in the history. One loves indeed the heart that believed, till he made his friend the hero of his epic. His capital fault is, his whole work being a laboured justification of king Charles. No man ever delivered so much truth with so little sincerity. If he relates faults, some palliating epithet always slides in and he has the art of breaking his darkest shades with gleams of light that take

6 [There are wise and deep-thinking men, in this more enlightened age, who do not consider these things with so much levity. Sir E. Brydges.]