to unwieldiness and even confusion. But the short, clipped style of later historians is not in the long-run less wearisome, and Clarendon's prose has the virtues as well as the faults of its age—dignity, feeling, pregnancy, felicitous phrase and figure. His portraits, whether of friend or foe, if not, as Evelyn said to Pepys, "without the least ingredient of passion or tincture of revenge," are works of art,—full, significant, and suggestive of more than is always said. Charles's weaknesses disengage themselves unmistakably from the eulogy in which they are conveyed, and the picture of the "brave bad man" Cromwell, read fully and dispassionately, is still one of the finest tributes to that great but confessedly complex character.
In an age that was so addicted to the study and portrayal of character, in drama, history, essay, or Biography—Walton. epigram, it would have been strange if biography had not been cultivated, even though the time had not yet come for ponderous reminiscences and collections of letters. Jonson and Clarendon etched their own portraits; Milton found it difficult to keep himself out of anything he wrote; and Lord Herbert of Cherbury[1] and Hobbes[2] indulged themselves in more detailed autobiography. The puritan Mrs Hutcheson[3] and the cavalier Duchess of Newcastle[3] heralded, in very different ways, that
- ↑ Autobiography (pr. 1764).
- ↑ Vita carmine expressa a seipso (1681).
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Memoirs of her husband's life pub. 1806, ed. C. H. Firth, Lond., 1885. The Duchess's autobiography (1656) and life of her husband (1667), whom she portrays in the elevated style of seventeenth century romance, have been edited by Prof. Firth, 1886.
