’to be very free from any of those passions which naturally transport men with prejudice towards the persons whom they are obliged to mention, and whose actions they are at liberty to censure.’  It was beyond human nature for a man who had lived through what he did to be completely unprejudiced.  He did not always scrupulously weigh what he knew would be to the discredit of the Parliamentary leaders, nor did he ignore mere Royalist rumour, as in the character of Pym.  But his characters of them are often more favourable than might have been expected.  He may show his personal dislike, or even his sense of their crime, but behind this he permits us to see the qualities which contributed to their success.  There can be no reasonable objection to his characters of Hampden and Cromwell.  Political partisans find them disappointing, and they are certainly not the final verdict.  The worst that can be said of them is that they are drawn from a wrong point of view; but from that point of view their honesty is unquestionable.  He does not distinguish men by their party.  The folly of his own side is exhibited as relentlessly as the knavery of his opponents.  Of no one did he write a more unfavourable character than the Earl of Arundel.  He explains the failure of Laud, and he does not conceal the weakness of Charles.

There is a broad distinction between his earlier and later characters.  While he was still in the midst of the conflict and hoped to influence it by stating what he knew, he depicted the individual in relation to events.  When the conflict was over and he was at leisure to draw on his recollections, he made the individual to a greater degree the representative of the type.  But the distinction is not clearly marked, and Clarendon may not have suspected it.  His habitual detachment was assisted by his exile.  The displeasure of his ungrateful master, from whom he had never been separated during seventeen difficult years, had proved the vanity of the little things of life.  He looked at men from a distance that obscures what is insignificant, and shows only the essential.

All his characters are clearly defined.  We never confound them; we never have any doubt of how he understood them.  He sees men as a whole before he begins to describe them, and then his only difficulty, as his manuscripts show, is to make his pen move fast enough.  He does not build up his characters.  He does not, as many others do, start with the external features in the hope of arriving at the central facts.  He starts from the centre and works outwards.  This is the reason of the convincingness of his characters, their dramatic truth.  The dramatic sense in him is stronger than the pictorial.