Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles by Various
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books, or writing some animadversions and exercitations of his own,
as appears by the papers and notes which he left.' The activity of these years of banishment is remarkable in a man who had turned sixty and had passed through about thirty years of continuous storm. His intellectual vitality was unimpaired. The old English jollity that Evelyn had remarked in him in happier if more difficult days had gone, but the even temper from which it had sprung still remained. He was at his best as a writer then; writing was never an effort to him, but in his exile it was an exercise and recreation. He could have said with Dryden that 'what judgment I had increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject'. He was still in hopes that he would be allowed to return to England, to die in his own country and among his children. 'Seven years', he said, 'was a time prescribed and limited by God himself for the expiration of some of his greatest judgements.'[10] In the seventh year of his banishment he left Moulins for Rouen, so as to be nearer home. His hopes were vain. He died at Rouen on December 9, 1674.[11] His body was brought to England for burial in Westminster. * * * * * Clarendon had been interested in the study of character all his life. His earliest work was 'The Difference and Disparity between the Estates and Conditions of George Duke of Buckingham and Robert Earl of Essex'. Sir Henry Wotton had written observations on these statesmen 'by way of parallel', and Clarendon pointed out as a sequel wherein they differed. It is a somewhat laboured composition in comparison with his later work, a young man's careful essay that lacks the |
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