under some sharp visitation of the gout, from reading excellent books, or writing some animadversions and exercitations of his own, as appears by the papers and notes which he left.’  The activity of these years of banishment is remarkable in a man who had turned sixty and had passed through about thirty years of continuous storm.  His intellectual vitality was unimpaired.  The old English jollity that Evelyn had remarked in him in happier if more difficult days had gone, but the even temper from which it had sprung still remained.  He was at his best as a writer then; writing was never an effort to him, but in his exile it was an exercise and recreation.  He could have said with Dryden that ’what judgment I had increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject’.

He was still in hopes that he would be allowed to return to England, to die in his own country and among his children.  ‘Seven years’, he said, ’was a time prescribed and limited by God himself for the expiration of some of his greatest judgements.’[10] In the seventh year of his banishment he left Moulins for Rouen, so as to be nearer home.  His hopes were vain.  He died at Rouen on December 9, 1674.[11] His body was brought to England for burial in Westminster.

* * * * *

Clarendon had been interested in the study of character all his life.  His earliest work was ’The Difference and Disparity between the Estates and Conditions of George Duke of Buckingham and Robert Earl of Essex’.  Sir Henry Wotton had written observations on these statesmen ‘by way of parallel’, and Clarendon pointed out as a sequel wherein they differed.  It is a somewhat laboured composition in comparison with his later work, a young man’s careful essay that lacks the confidence that comes with experience, but it shows at an early stage the talents which knowledge and practice were to develop into mastery.  The school in which he learned most was the circle of his friends.  Few men can have owed more to their friends than he did, or have been more generous in acknowledging the debt.  He tells us he was often heard to say that ’next the immediate blessing and providence of God Almighty, which had preserved him throughout the whole course of his life (less strict than it ought to have been) from many dangers and disadvantages, in which many other young men were lost, he owed all the little he knew, and the little good that was in him, to the friendships and conversation he had still been used to, of the most excellent men in their several kinds that lived in that age; by whose learning, and information, and instruction, he formed his studies, and mended his understanding, and by whose gentleness and sweetness of behaviour, and justice, and virtue, and example, he formed his manners, subdued that pride and suppressed that heat and passion he was naturally inclined to be transported with.’