thereby irritated his friends and at last grew confident of nothing;
how Hales, great in scholarship but diminutive in stature, liked to be
by himself but had a very open and pleasant conversation in congenial
company; how Waller nursed his reputation for ready wit by seeming
to speak on the sudden what he had thoroughly considered. In all his
accounts of the friends of his youth Clarendon is in the background,
but we picture him moving among them at ease, conscious of his
inferiority in learning and brilliance and the gentler virtues,
yet trusting to his own judgement, and convinced that every man
worth knowing has a pronounced individuality. In these happy and
irresponsible days, when he numbered poets among his friends, he
himself wrote poetry. Little of it is preserved. He contributed
introductory verses to Davenant's _Albovine_, and composed verses on
the death of Donne. His poetry was well enough known for Dryden to
allude to it during his Lord Chancellorship, in the address presented
to him at the height of his power in 1662:

The _Muses_, who your early Courtship boast,
Though now your Flames are with their Beauty lost,
Yet watch their Time, that if you have forgot
They were your Mistresses, the world may not.

But first the law claimed him, and then politics, and then came the
Civil War. As Privy Councillor and Chancellor of the Exchequer he was
in the thick of the conflict. The men whom he had now to study were
men of affairs. He had the clear and unimpassioned vision which often
goes with a warm temperament, and could scrutinize his friends without
endangering his affection for them. However deeply his feelings might
be engaged, he had taken a pleasure in trying to see them exactly as
they were. When he came to judge his political enemies he continued