Selections from Clarendon. Edited, with short Notes, by the Very
Rev. G. D. Boyle, M.A., Dean of Salisbury. (Clarendon Press, Oxford.)—The Doan of Salisbury has produced a welcome book. There is no English historian who can compete with Clarendon in the art of historical portraiture, and not one who, with a personal knowledge of the period he describes, has written with so masterly a pen. His great merits, however, do not make his faults less conspicuous. Clarendon wrote in exile, and with- out his books. He had frequently to draw upon his memory, and it played him false. He may have been as prejudiced as Milton; and if he does not rival the splendour of Milton's prose, neither does he indulge in what Mark Pattison calls " the insolent swagger" and "vulgar scurrility" of his polemical pamphlets. Like Milton, Clarendon too often writes paragraphs of a pro- digious length, which carry the reader into a labyrinth from which he finds it difficult to escape; but we forget or forgive his faults when he has an important action to describe or a striking character to draw. Clarendon writes in the "great style" that belongs to the period, and of which Hooker was the earliest master. He is always dignified, always vigorous, and has at the same time the high virtue of perceiving the bearing of events. Dean Boyle observes, and we think with truth, that the estimate formed by Ranke "as to Clarendon's historical position will probably be accepted generally as a thoroughly trustworthy account of this great writer." And we may add that, coming from a German, it is all the more valuable. Clarendon must be read with caution ; but his work is indis- pensable to the student of the time, and despite the encumbrances of his style, he will be always read with pleasure. The selections form a delightful volume, good for reading in all seasons, and the success of Dean Boyle's design appears to us complete. Lord Macaulay said that there were few things in English literature better worth a young man's study than the characters in Clarendon and this volume, which contains the historian's finest portraits, will prove the correctness of the judgment.
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