He used often to say, he continues, that ’he never was so proud, or thought himself so good a man, as when he was the worst man in the company’.  He cultivated his friendships, it is true, with an eye to his advancement; but it is equally true that he had a nature which invited friendships.  He enjoyed to the full the pleasure of living and seeing others live, and a great part of his pleasure consisted in observing how men differed in their habits and foibles.  He tells how Ben Jonson did not understand why young Mr. Hyde should neglect the delights of his company at the call of business; how Selden, with all his stupendous learning, was never more studious of anything than his ease; how Earle gave a wrong impression by the negligence of his dress and mien, whereas no man was more wary and cultivated in his behaviour and discourse; how Chillingworth argued for the pleasure of arguing and thereby irritated his friends and at last grew confident of nothing; how Hales, great in scholarship but diminutive in stature, liked to be by himself but had a very open and pleasant conversation in congenial company; how Waller nursed his reputation for ready wit by seeming to speak on the sudden what he had thoroughly considered.  In all his accounts of the friends of his youth Clarendon is in the background, but we picture him moving among them at ease, conscious of his inferiority in learning and brilliance and the gentler virtues, yet trusting to his own judgement, and convinced that every man worth knowing has a pronounced individuality.  In these happy and irresponsible days, when he numbered poets among his friends, he himself wrote poetry.  Little of it is preserved.  He contributed introductory verses to Davenant’s Albovine, and composed verses on the death of Donne.  His poetry was well enough known for Dryden to allude to it during his Lord Chancellorship, in the address presented to him at the height of his power in 1662: 

  The Muses, who your early Courtship boast,
  Though now your Flames are with their Beauty lost,
  Yet watch their Time, that if you have forgot
  They were your Mistresses, the world may not.

But first the law claimed him, and then politics, and then came the Civil War.  As Privy Councillor and Chancellor of the Exchequer he was in the thick of the conflict.  The men whom he had now to study were men of affairs.  He had the clear and unimpassioned vision which often goes with a warm temperament, and could scrutinize his friends without endangering his affection for them.  However deeply his feelings might be engaged, he had taken a pleasure in trying to see them exactly as they were.  When he came to judge his political enemies he continued the same attitude of detachment, and studiously cultivated it.  ’I am careful’, he said in a private letter,[12] ’to do justice to every man who hath fallen in the quarrel, on which side soever.’  ’I know myself’, he said in the History,[13]