The habit of laborious studies, and a zealous attention to the history of his own times, produced the Register and Chronicle of Bishop Kennett.  “Containing matters of fact, delivered in the words of the most authentic papers and records, all daily entered and commented on:”  it includes an account of all pamphlets as they appeared.  This history, more valuable to us than to his own contemporaries, occupied two large folios, of which only one has been printed:  a zealous labour, which could only have been carried on from a motive of pure patriotism.  It is, however, but a small part of the diligence of the bishop, since his own manuscripts form a small library of themselves.

The malignant vengeance of Prynne in exposing the diary of Laud to the public eye, lost all its purpose, for nothing appeared more favourable to Laud than this exposition of his private diary.  We forget the harshness in the personal manners of Laud himself, and sympathise even with his errors, when we turn over the simple leaves of this diary, which obviously was not intended for any purpose but for his own private eye and collected meditations.[105] There his whole heart is laid open:  his errors are not concealed, and the purity of his intentions is established.  Laud, who too haughtily blended the prime minister with the archbishop, still, from conscientious motives, in the hurry of public duties, and in the pomp of public honours, could steal aside into solitude, to account to God and himself for every day, and “the evil thereof.”

The diary of Henry Earl of Clarendon, who inherited the industry of his father, has partly escaped destruction; it presents us with a picture of the manners of the age, from whence, says Bishop Douglas, we may learn that at the close of the last century, a man of the first quality made it his constant practice to pass his time without shaking his arm at a gaming-table, associating with jockeys at Newmarket, or murdering time by a constant round of giddy dissipation, if not of criminal indulgence.  Diaries were not uncommon in the last age:  Lord Anglesea, who made so great a figure in the reign of Charles the Second, left one behind him; and one said to have been written by the Duke of Shrewsbury still exists.

But the most admirable example is Lord Clarendon’s History of his own “Life,” or rather of the court, and every event and person passing before him.  In this moving scene he copies nature with freedom, and has exquisitely touched the individual character.  There that great statesman opens the most concealed transactions, and traces the views of the most opposite dispositions; and, though engaged, when in exile, in furthering the royal intercourse with the loyalists, and when, on the Restoration, conducting the difficult affairs of a great nation, a careless monarch, and a dissipated court, yet besides his immortal history of the civil wars, “the chancellor of human nature” passed his life in habitual reflection, and his pen in daily employment.  Such was the admirable industry of our later ancestors:  their diaries and their memoirs are its monuments!