great virility in a man--a big, deep, rough voice, better suited to,
and no doubt oftener employed in, quarter-deck oaths and foulnesses
than the worship of his Maker."

Thus my Lord Henry Goade, and you observe how he permits his lingering
disapproval of the man to intrude upon his description of him. The
truth is that--as there is ample testimony in his prolific writings--
is lordship was something of a misanthropist. It was, in fact, his
misanthropy which drove him, as it has driven many another, to
authorship. He takes up the pen, not so much that he may carry out his
professed object of writing a chronicle of his own time, but to the end
that he may vent the bitterness engendered in him by his fall from
favour. As a consequence he has little that is good to say of anyone,
and rarely mentions one of his contemporaries but to tap the sources of
a picturesque invective. After all, it is possible to make excuses for
him. He was at once a man of thought and a man of action--a
combination as rare as it is usually deplorable. The man of action in
him might have gone far had he not been ruined at the outset by the man
of thought. A magnificent seaman, he might have become Lord High
Admiral of England but for a certain proneness to intrigue.
Fortunately for him--since otherwise he could hardly have kept his
head where nature had placed it--he came betimes under a cloud of
suspicion. His career suffered a check; but it was necessary to afford
him some compensation since, after all, the suspicions could not be
substantiated.

Consequently he was removed from his command and appointed by the
Queen's Grace her Lieutenant of Cornwall, a position in which it was
judged that he could do little mischief. There, soured by this
blighting of his ambitions, and living a life of comparative seclusion,