was too big for his mouth, which made him bedew all that he talked to.’  There is no hint of this in Clarendon’s character of Lauderdale, nor could Clarendon have spoken with the same directness.  Burnet has no circumlocutions, just as in private life he was not known to indulge in them.  When he reports what was said in conversation he gives the very words.  Lauderdale ’was a man, as the Duke of Buckingham called him to me, of a blundering understanding’.  Halifax ’hoped that God would not lay it to his charge, if he could not digest iron, as an ostrich did, nor take into his belief things that must burst him’.  It is the directness and actuality of such things as these, and above all his habit of describing men in relation to himself, that make his best characters so vivid.  Burnet is seldom in the background.  He allows us to suspect that it is not the man himself whom he presents to us but the man as he knew him, though he would not have admitted the distinction.  He could not imitate the detachment of Clarendon, who is always deliberately impersonal, and writes as if he were pronouncing the impartial judgement of history from which there can be no appeal.  Burnet views his men from a much nearer distance.  His perspective may sometimes be at fault, but he gets the detail.

With all his shrewd observation, it must be admitted that his range of comprehension was limited.  There were no types of character too subtle for Clarendon to understand.  There were some which eluded Burnet’s grasp.  He is at his best in describing such a man as Lauderdale, where the roughness of the style is in perfect keeping with the subject.  His character of Shaftesbury, whom he says he knew for many years in a very particular manner, is a valuable study and a remarkable companion piece to Dryden’s Achitophel.  But he did not understand Halifax.  The surface levity misled him.  He tells us unsuspectingly as much about himself as about Halifax.  He tells us that the Trimmer could never be quite serious in the good bishop’s company.

We learn more about Halifax from his own elaborate study of Charles II.  It is a prolonged analysis by a man of clear vision, and perfect balance of judgement, and no prepossessions; who was, moreover, master of the easy pellucid style that tends to maxim and epigram.  A more impartial and convincing estimate of any king need never be expected.  In method and purpose, it stands by itself.  It is indeed not so much a character in the accepted sense of the word as a scientific investigation of a personality.  Others try to make us see and understand their men; Halifax anatomizes.  Yet he occasionally permits us to discover his own feelings.  Nothing disappointed him more in the merry monarch than the company he kept, and his comprehensive taste in wit.  ’Of all men that ever liked those who had wit, he could the best endure those who had none’:  there is more here than is on the surface; we see at once Charles, and his court, and Halifax himself.