rate autobiography that had yet been attempted in English. The
manuscript consists of over six hundred pages, and each page contains
on an average about a thousand words. He wrote with perfect freedom,
for this work, unlike the earlier _History_, was not intended for the
eyes of the King, and the didactic days were over. He wrote too with
remarkable ease. The very appearance of the manuscript, where page
follows page with hardly an erasure, and the 'fine hand' becomes finer
and finer, conveys even a sense of relief and pleasure. His pen seems
to move of itself and the long and elaborate sentences to evolve of
their own free will. The story of his life became a loose framework
into which he could fit all that he wished to tell of his own times;
and the more he told, his vindication would be the more complete.
'Even unawares', he admitted, 'many things are inserted not so
immediately applicable to his own person, which possibly may
hereafter, in some other method, be communicated to the world.'[8] He
welcomed the opportunity to tell all that he knew. There was no reason
for reticence. He wrote of men as of things frankly as he knew them.
More than a history of the Rebellion, his _Life_ is also a picture of
the society in which he had moved. It is the work which contains most
of his characters.[9]

His early _History_ had been left behind in England on his sudden
flight. For about four years he was debarred from all intercourse with
his family, but in 1671 the royal displeasure so far relaxed that his
second son, Laurence, was granted a pass to visit him, and he brought
the manuscript that had been left untouched for twenty years. They met
in June at Moulins, which was to be Clarendon's home till April 1674.
Once the old and the new work were both in his hands, he cast his
great _History of the Rebellion_ in its final form, and thus 'finished
the work which his heart was most set upon'. In June 1672 he turned
to the 'Continuation of his Life', which deals with his Chancellorship
and his fall, and was not intended 'ever for a public view, or for
more than the information of his children'. As its conclusion shows,
it was his last work to be completed, but while engaged on it he found
time to write much else, including his reply to Hobbes's _Leviathan_.
'In all this retirement', he could well say, in a passage which reads
like his obituary, 'he was very seldom vacant, and then only when he
was under some sharp visitation of t