However, a historical examination of Clarendon's great work is not here in place. The occasional defect of his style is the enormous bulk of some of his sentences. Two occupy two large pages and each contains some 400 words. Here are structureless agglutinations of parentheses: with the promising word "lastly" left stranded far from the conclusion. But such examples are not very common, and Clarendon describes action and intrigue with lucidity, and especially excels in his set pieces, delineations of characters, for example of Cromwell[1] and Argyll. His "characters" may not be exact, of course, but his knowledge of secret motives was extensive, and such knowledge, if not always accurate, is ever entertaining. All histories, as sources of knowledge, are sure to be superseded by the discoverer of new information. But the History of Clarendon can never cease to be of the highest interest, moral, political, and personal. He possessed, in his own words, "the genius, spirit, and soul of an historian," combined with knowledge of great affairs, important personages, and intrigues of Court.
Among writers of prose of the age it would be ungrateful not to mention an author so familiar and readable as the gossiping James Howell (1594-1666) of the "Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ," a favourite bedside book of Thackeray. Howell was imprisoned by the Puritans, and wrote essays in form of letters which are full of curious anecdotes and reminiscences of travel.
Much later comes the prince of gossips, Mr. Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), whose Diary in shorthand, written for his personal diversion, can never cease to divert, and, in a way, as a picture of a strange age and a strange character, to instruct. Each new dip into Mr. Pepys's manuscript, by each bolder editor, makes us like him less from the extended candour of his unparalleled confessions, which is a pity.
John Evelyn (1620-1706) depicts the same period as Pepys, as it was seen by a gentleman of stainless honour, unblemished virtue, and great curiosity in the arts, and in the nascent science. His Diary is much more entertaining than his memoir of the Lady in the "Comus" of the merry Monarch's Court, the lovely and religious Mistress Margaret Godolphin (née Blague), to whom Evelyn was virtuously devoted.
Roger North (1653-1733), is admirably readable, and very modern in the tone of his satire of the godly Whigs, in the "Examen,"—when he drops into slang it is with the careless grace of Thackeray. His "Lives of the Norths," himself and his brothers, is most interesting.
[1] To him he attributes a coarse pun which might seem more familiar in the mouth of James I.