Christian Duties, Divine and Moral, a collection of twenty-five essays, some of considerable length, on subjects largely suggested by his own circumstances; and he completed between December 1668 and February 1671 his Contemplations and Reflections upon the Psalms of David, an elaborate exposition extending to well over four hundred folio pages of print, which he had begun at Jersey in 1647.  But his great work at this time was his Life, begun on July 23, 1668, and brought down to 1660 by August 1, 1670.  It is by far the most elaborate autobiography that had yet been attempted in English.  The manuscript consists of over six hundred pages, and each page contains on an average about a thousand words.  He wrote with perfect freedom, for this work, unlike the earlier History, was not intended for the eyes of the King, and the didactic days were over.  He wrote too with remarkable ease.  The very appearance of the manuscript, where page follows page with hardly an erasure, and the ‘fine hand’ becomes finer and finer, conveys even a sense of relief and pleasure.  His pen seems to move of itself and the long and elaborate sentences to evolve of their own free will.  The story of his life became a loose framework into which he could fit all that he wished to tell of his own times; and the more he told, his vindication would be the more complete.  ‘Even unawares’, he admitted, ’many things are inserted not so immediately applicable to his own person, which possibly may hereafter, in some other method, be communicated to the world.’[8] He welcomed the opportunity to tell all that he knew.  There was no reason for reticence.  He wrote of men as of things frankly as he knew them.  More than a history of the Rebellion, his Life is also a picture of the society in which he had moved.  It is the work which contains most of his characters.[9]

His early History had been left behind in England on his sudden flight.  For about four years he was debarred from all intercourse with his family, but in 1671 the royal displeasure so far relaxed that his second son, Laurence, was granted a pass to visit him, and he brought the manuscript that had been left untouched for twenty years.  They met in June at Moulins, which was to be Clarendon’s home till April 1674.  Once the old and the new work were both in his hands, he cast his great History of the Rebellion in its final form, and thus ’finished the work which his heart was most set upon’.  In June 1672 he turned to the ‘Continuation of his Life’, which deals with his Chancellorship and his fall, and was not intended ’ever for a public view, or for more than the information of his children’.  As its conclusion shows, it was his last work to be completed, but while engaged on it he found time to write much else, including his reply to Hobbes’s Leviathan.  ‘In all this retirement’, he could well say, in a passage which reads like his obituary, ’he was very seldom vacant, and then only when he was