He troubles little about personal appearance, or any of the traits which would enable us to visualize his men.  We understand them rather than see them.  Hampden, he tells us, was ’of a most civil and affable deportment’ and had ‘a flowing courtesy to all men’, a ’rare temper and modesty’; it is Sir Philip Warwick who speaks of the ’scurf commonly on his face’.[14] He says that the younger Vane ’had an unusual aspect’, and leaves us wondering what was unusual.  His Falkland is an exception, but he adopted a different scale when describing his greatest friend and only hero.  Each of his two accounts of Falkland is in fact a brief biography rather than a character; the earliest of them, written shortly after Falkland’s death, he once thought of making into a volume by itself.  In his characters proper he confines himself more strictly than any other writer to matters of character.  They are characters rather than portraits.

But portraiture was one of his passions, though he left its practice to the painters.  He adorned his houses with the likenesses of his friends.  It was fitting that our greatest character writer should have formed one of the great collections of pictures of ’wits, poets, philosophers, famous and learned Englishmen’.[15] To describe them on paper, and to contrive that they should look down on him from his walls, were different ways of indulging the same keen and tireless interest in the life amid which he moved.

[Footnote 1:  For a detailed examination of the composition and value of Clarendon’s History see the three articles by Professor C.H.  Firth in The English Historical Review for 1904.  No student of Clarendon can ever afford to neglect them.]

[Footnote 2:  See No. 33, introductory note.]

[Footnote 3:  See No. 6, introductory note, and No. 36, p. 140, II. 17-22 note.]

[Footnote 4:  Contractions have been expanded.  The punctuation of the original is slight, and it has been found desirable occasionally to insert commas, where seventeenth century printers would have inserted them; but the run of the sentences has not been disturbed.  In modernized versions Clarendon’s long sentences are sometimes needlessly subdivided.]

[Footnote 5:  State Papers, 1773, vol. ii, pp. 288-9.]

[Footnote 6:  Letter of March 16, 1647; infra p. 275.]

[Footnote 7:  Letter of January 8, 1647; T.H.  Lister, Life of Clarendon, 1837, vol. iii, p. 43.]

[Footnote 8:  Ed. 1857, part 1, Sec. 85; omitted in the edition of 1759.]

[Footnote 9:  Of the thirty-seven characters by Clarendon in this volume, twenty-seven are from the ’Manuscript Life’.]

[Footnote 10:  State Papers, 1786, vol. iii, supp., p. xlv.]

[Footnote 11:  Clarendon’s lifetime coincided almost exactly with Milton’s.  He was two months younger than Milton, and died one month later.]

[Footnote 12:  December 14, 1647; infra p. 275.]