st multitude of papers, notes,
letters--his more private ones he had ordered not to be opened for
seven years; about two bushels full were ordered for the fire, which
they had lighted for the occasion. "As he was expiring, he expressed
both his knowledge and approbation of what was done by throwing out
his hands."

Turn over his Herculean labour; do not admire less his fearlessness of
danger, than his indefatigable pursuit of truth. He wrote of his
contemporaries as if he felt a right to judge of them, and as if he
were living in the succeeding age; courtier, fanatic, or papist, were
much alike to honest Anthony; for he professes himself "such an
universal lover of all mankind, that he wished there might be no cheat
put upon readers and writers in the business of commendations. And
(says he) since every one will have a double balance, one for his own
party, and another for his adversary, all he could do is to amass
together what every side thinks will make best weight for themselves.
Let posterity hold the scales."

Anthony might have added, "I have held them." This uninterrupted
activity of his spirits was the action of a sage, not the bustle of
one intent merely on heaping up a book.

"He never wrote in post, with his body and thoughts in a hurry, but in
a fixed abode, and with a deliberate pen. And he never concealed an
ungrateful truth, nor flourished over a weak place, but in sincerity
of meaning and expression."

Anthony Wood cloistered an athletic mind, a hermit critic abstracted from
the world, existing more with posterity than amid his contemporaries. His
prejudices were the keener from the very energies of the mind that
produced them; but, as he practises no deception on his reader, we know
the causes of his anger or his love. And, as an original thinker creates
a style for himself, from the circumstance of not attending to style at
all, but to feeling, so Anthony Wood's has all the peculiarity of the
writer. Critics of short views have attempted to screen it from ridicule,
attributing his uncouth style to the age he lived in. But not one in his
own time nor since, has composed in the same style. The austerity and
the quickness of his feelings vigorously stamped all their roughness and
vivacity on every sentence. He describes his own style as "an honest,
plain English dress, without flourishes or affectation of style, as best
becomes a history of truth and matters of fact. It is the first (work)
of its na