he gout, from reading excellent
books, or writing some animadversions and exercitations of his own,
as appears by the papers and notes which he left.' The activity of
these years of banishment is remarkable in a man who had turned sixty
and had passed through about thirty years of continuous storm. His
intellectual vitality was unimpaired. The old English jollity that
Evelyn had remarked in him in happier if more difficult days had gone,
but the even temper from which it had sprung still remained. He was at
his best as a writer then; writing was never an effort to him, but in
his exile it was an exercise and recreation. He could have said with
Dryden that 'what judgment I had increases rather than diminishes; and
thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my
only difficulty is to choose or to reject'.

He was still in hopes that he would be allowed to return to England,
to die in his own country and among his children. 'Seven years',
he said, 'was a time prescribed and limited by God himself for the
expiration of some of his greatest judgements.'[10] In the seventh
year of his banishment he left Moulins for Rouen, so as to be nearer
home. His hopes were vain. He died at Rouen on December 9, 1674.[11]
His body was brought to England for burial in Westminster.

* * * * *

Clarendon had been interested in the study of character all his
life. His earliest work was 'The Difference and Disparity between the
Estates and Conditions of George Duke of Buckingham and Robert Earl of
Essex'. Sir Henry Wotton had written observations on these statesmen
'by way of parallel', and Clarendon pointed out as a sequel wherein
they differed. It is a somewhat laboured composition in comparison
with his later work, a young man's careful essay that lacks the
confidence that comes with experience, but it shows at an early stage
the talents which knowledge and practice were to develop into mastery.
The school in which he learned most was the circle of his friends. Few
men can have owed more to their friends than he did, or have been more
generous in acknowledging the debt. He tells us he was often heard to
say that 'next the immediate blessing and providence of God Almighty,
which had preserved him throughout the whole course of his life
(less strict than it ought to have been) from many dangers and
disadvantages, in which many other young men were lost, he owed
all the little he knew, and