intimately, found him not only passionate, especially in his old
age, but resentful; so that the interposition of friends was
sometimes necessary.

His wit and his poetry naturally connected him with the polite
writers of his time: he was joined with Lord Buckhurst in the
translation of Corneille's Pompey; and is said to have added his
help to that of Cowley in the original draft of the Rehearsal.

The care of his fortune, which Clarendon imputes to him in a degree
little less than criminal, was either not constant or not
successful; for having inherited a patrimony of three thousand five
hundred pounds a year in the time of James the First, and augmented
at least by one wealthy marriage, he left, about the time of the
Revolution, an income of not more than twelve or thirteen hundred;
which, when the different value of money is reckoned, will be found
perhaps not more than a fourth part of what he once possessed.

Of this diminution, part was the consequence of the gifts which he
was forced to scatter, and the fine which he was condemned to pay at
the detection of his plot; and if his estate, as is related in his
life, was sequestered, he had probably contracted debts when he
lived in exile; for we are told, that at Paris he lived in
splendour, and was the only Englishman, except the Lord St. Albans,
that kept a table.

His unlucky plot compelled him to sell a thousand a year; of the
waste of the rest there is no account, except that he is confessed
by his biographer to have been a bad economist. He seems to have
deviated from the common practice; to have been a hoarder in his