or Waller; and for this reason, that Clarendon
envisages them, not as scholars or poets but as men, and gains a
definite and complete effect within small compass.

Roger North made his life of his brother Lord Keeper Guilford an
account of the bench and bar under Charles II and James II. Of its
many sketches of lawyers whom he or his brother had known, none is
so perfect in every way as the character of Chief Justice Saunders, a
remarkable man in real life who still lives in North's pages with
all his eccentricities. North writes at length about his brother,
yet nowhere do we see and understand him so clearly as we see and
understand Saunders. The truth is that a life and a character have
different objects and methods and do not readily combine. It is only
a small admixture of biography that a character will endure. And with
the steady development of biography the character declined.

A character must be short; and it must be entire, the complete
expression of a clear judgement. The perfect model is provided
by Clarendon. He has more than formal excellence. 'Motives', said
Johnson, 'are generally unknown. We cannot trust to the characters
we find in history, unless when they are drawn by those who knew the
persons; as those, for instance, by Sallust and by Lord Clarendon.'[4]

[Footnote 1: Letter to Pepys, January 20, 1703; Pepys's _Diary_, ed.
Braybrooke, 1825, vol. ii, p. 290.]

[Footnote 2: 'Short Remarks on Bishop Burnet's _History_,' _ad init._]

[Footnote 3: _History_, preface]

[Footnote 4: Boswell, 1769, ed. G.B. Hill, vol. ii, p. 79.]

* * * * *

Sooner or later every one who deals with the history or literature
of the seventeenth century has to own his obligations to Professor
C.H. Firth. My debt is not confined to his writings, references to
which will be found continually in the notes. At every stage of
the preparation of this volume I have had the advantage of his most
generous interest. And with his name it is a pleasure to associate in
one compendious acknowledgement the names of Dr. Henry Bradley and Mr.
Percy Simpson.

Oxford,
September 16, 1918.
D.N.S.

1.

JAMES I.

_James VI of Scotland 1567. James I 1603._

_Born 1566. Died 1625._

By ARTHUR WILSON.

He was born a King, and from that height, the less fitted to look
into inferiour things; yet few escaped his knowledge, being, as it
were, a _Magazine_ to retain them. His _Stature_ was of