to pass muster.  A high-minded man he certainly was not, either in public or in private affairs.  His own account of his conduct in the affair of his daughter is the most extraordinary passage in autobiography.  We except nothing even in the Confessions of Rousseau.  Several writers have taken a perverted and absurd pride in representing themselves as detestable; but no other ever laboured hard to make himself despicable and ridiculous.  In one important particular Clarendon showed as little regard to the honour of his country as he had shown to that of his family.  He accepted a subsidy from France for the relief of Portugal.  But this method of obtaining money was afterwards practised to a much greater extent and for objects much less respectable, both by the Court and by the Opposition.

These pecuniary transactions are commonly considered as the most disgraceful part of the history of those times:  and they were no doubt highly reprehensible.  Yet, in justice to the Whigs and to Charles himself, we must admit that they were not so shameful or atrocious as at the present day they appear.  The effect of violent animosities between parties has always been an indifference to the general welfare and honour of the State.  A politician, where factions run high, is interested not for the whole people, but for his own section of it.  The rest are, in his view, strangers, enemies, or rather pirates.  The strongest aversion which he can feel to any foreign power is the ardour of friendship, when compared with the loathing which he entertains towards those domestic foes with whom he is cooped up in a narrow space, with whom he lives in a constant interchange of petty injuries and insults, and from whom, in the day of their success, he has to expect severities far beyond any that a conqueror from a distant country would inflict.  Thus, in Greece, it was a point of honour for a man to cleave to his party against his country.  No aristocratical citizen of Samos or Corcyra would have hesitated to call in the aid of Lacedaemon.  The multitude, on the contrary, looked everywhere to Athens.  In the Italian states of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from the same cause, no man was so much a Pisan or a Florentine as a Ghibeline or a Guelf.  It may be doubted whether there was a single individual who would have scrupled to raise his party from a state of depression, by opening the gates of his native city to a French or an Arragonese force.  The Reformation, dividing almost every European country into two parts, produced similar effects.  The Catholic was too strong for the Englishman, the Huguenot for the Frenchman.  The Protestant statesmen of Scotland and France called in the aid of Elizabeth; and the Papists of the League brought a Spanish army into the very heart of France.  The commotions to which the French Revolution gave rise were followed by the same consequences.  The Republicans in every part of Europe were eager to see the armies of the National Convention and the Directory appear among them, and exalted in defeats which distressed and humbled those whom they considered as their worst enemies, their own rulers.  The princes and nobles of France, on the other hand, did their utmost to bring foreign invaders to Paris.  A very short time has elapsed since the Apostolical party in Spain invoked, too successfully, the support of strangers.