Burnet does not always have perfect control of the impression he
wishes to convey. It is as if he did not have the whole character in
his mind before he began to write, but collected his thoughts from
the stores of his memory in the process of composition. We are often
uncertain how to understand a character before we have read it all. In
some cases he seems to be content to present us with the material from
which, once we have pieced it together ourselves, we can form our own
judgement. But what he tells us has been vividly felt by him, and is
vividly presented. The great merit of his characters lies in their
realism. Of the Earl of Lauderdale he says that 'He made a very ill
appearance: He was very big: His hair red, hanging oddly about him:
His tongue was too big for his mouth, which made him bedew all that
he talked to.' There is no hint of this in Clarendon's character of
Lauderdale, nor could Clarendon have spoken with the same directness.
Burnet has no circumlocutions, just as in private life he was
not known to indulge in them. When he reports what was said in
conversation he gives the very words. Lauderdale 'was a man, as the
Duke of Buckingham called him to me, of a blundering understanding'.
Halifax 'hoped that God would not lay it to his charge, if he could
not digest iron, as an ostrich did, nor take into his belief things
that must burst him'. It is the directness and actuality of such
things as these, and above all his habit of describing men in relation
to himself, that make his best characters so vivid. Burnet is seldom
in the background. He allows us to suspect that it is not the man
himself whom he presents to us but the man as he knew him, though
he would not have admitted the distinction. He could not imitate the
detachment of Clarendon, who is always deliberately impersonal, and
writes as if he were pronouncing the impartial judgement of history
from which there can be no appeal. Burnet views his men from a much
nearer distance. His perspective may sometimes be at fault, but he