of guilt, or dissimulation of manners, wind themselves into such trusts and secrets as enable them to make discoveries. The other, the liberty of opening letters, upon a suspicion that they might contain matter of dangerous consequence. For the first, he would say such instruments must be void of all ingenuity and common honesty before they could be of use, and afterwards they could never be fit to be credited and that no single preservation could be worth so general a wound and corruption of human society as the cherishing such persons would carry with it. The last he thought such a violation of the law of nature that no qualification by office could justify him in the trespass : and, though he was convinced by the necessity and iniquity of the time that those advantages of information were not to be declined, and were necessarily to be practised, he found means to put it off from himself, whilst he confessed he needed excuse and pardon for the omission; so unwilling was he to resign any part of good nature to an obligation in his office.

"In all other particulars he filled his place with great sufficiency, being well versed in languages, to understand any that are used in business, and to make himself again understood. To speak of his integrity, and his high disdain of any bait that might seem to look towards corruption, in tanto viro, injuria virtutem fuerit.' Some sharp expressions he used against the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his concurring in the first bill to take away the votes of Bishops in the House of Peers gave occasion to some to believe, and opportunity to others to conclude and publish, that he was no friend to the church, and the established government of it,' and troubled his friends much, who were more confident of the contrary than prepared to answer the allegation. The truth is, he had unhappily contracted some prejudice to the Archbishop; and, having observed his passion when, it may be, multiplicity of business, or rather indisposition, had possessed him, did wish him less entangled and engaged in the business of the Court or State: though, I speak it knowingly, he had a singular estimation and reverence of his

great learning, and confessed integrity; and really thought his own letting himself loose to those expressions which implied a disesteem of the Archbishop, or at least an acknowledgement of his infirmities, would enable him to shelter him from part of the storm he saw raised for his destruction, which he abominated with his soul.

"The giving his consent to the first bill for the displacing the Bishops did proceed from two grounds: the first, his not understanding then the original of their right and suffrage there; the other, an opinion that the combination against the whole government of the church by Bishops was so violent and furious that a less composition than the dispensing with their intermeddling in secular affairs would not preserve the order; and he was persuaded to this by the profession of many persons of honour, who declared they did desire the one, and would not then press the other, which in that particular misled many men: but when his observation and experience made him discern more of their intentions than he before suspected, with great frankness he opposed the second bill that was preferred for that purpose, and had without scruple the order itself in perfect reverence, and thought too great encouragement could not possibly be given to learning, nor too great rewards to learned men. He was never in the least degree moved or swayed by the objections which were made against that government in the church (holding them most ridiculous), or affected to the other, which those men fancied to themselves.

"He had a courage of the most clear and keen temper, and so far from fear that he seemed not without some appetite of danger, and therefore upon any occasion of action he always engaged his person in those troops which he thought by the forwardness of the commanders to be most like to be farthest engaged; and in all such encounters he had about him an extraordinary chearfulness, without at all affecting the execution that usually attended them, in which he took no delight, but took pains to prevent it, where it was not by resistance made necessary; insomuch that at

Edge Hill, when the enemy was routed, he was like to have incurred great peril by interposing to save those who had thrown away their arms, and against whom it may be others were more fierce for their having thrown them away; so that a man might think he came into the field chiefly out of curiosity to see the face of danger, and charity to prevent the shedding of blood. Yet in his natural inclination he acknowledged he was addicted to the profession of a soldier, and shortly after he came to his fortune, before he was of age, he went into the Low Countries, with a resolution of procuring command, and to give himself up to it, from which he was diverted by the complete inactivity of that summer; so he returned into England, and shortly after entered upon that vehement course of study we mentioned before, till the first alarm from the North: then again he made ready for the field, and though he received some repulse in the command of a troop of horse of which he had a promise, he went a volunteer with the Earl of Essex.

"From the entrance into this unnatural war his natural chearfulness and vivacity grew clouded, and a kind of sadness and dejection of spirit stole upon him, which he had never been used to; yet, being one of those who believed that one battle would end all differences, and that there would be so great a victory on one side that the other would be compelled to submit to any conditions of the victor (which supposition and conclusion generally sunk into the minds of most men, and prevented the looking after many advantages that might then have been laid hold of) he resisted those indispositions, et in luctu, bellum inter remidia erat.' But after the King's return from Brentford, and the furious resolution of the two Houses not to admit any treaty for peace, those indispositions which had before touched him grew into a perfect habit of unchearfulness, and he who had been so exactly easy and affable to all men that his face and countenance was always present, and vacant to his company, and held any cloudiness and less pleasantness of the visage a kind of rudeness or incivility, became on a sudden less communicable, and thence,

very sad, pale, and exceedingly affected with the spleen. In his clothes and habit, which he had minded before always with more neatness, and industry, and expense, than is usual to so great a soul, he was not now only incurious, but too negligent; and in his reception of suitors, and the necessary or casual addresses to his place, so quick, and sharp, and severe, that there wanted not some men, strangers to his nature and disposition, who believed him proud and imperious, from which no mortal man was ever more free.

"It is true that as he was of a most incomparable gentleness, application, and even submission, to good, and worthy, and entire men, so he was naturally (which could not but be more evident in his place, which subjected him to another conversation and intermixture than his own election would have done) adversus malos injucundus, and was so ill a dissembler of his dislike and disinclination to ill men that it was not possible for such not to discern it. There was once in the House of Commons such a declared acceptation of the good service an eminent member had done to them, and, as they said to the whole kingdom, that it was moved, he being present, that the Speaker might, in the name of the whole House, give him thanks; and then that every member might as a testimony of his particular acknowledgement, stir, or move his hat towards him; the which, though not ordered, when very many did, the Lord Falkland, who believed the service itself not to be of that moment, and that an honourable and generous person could not have stooped to it for any recompence, instead of moving his hat, stretched both his arms out, and clasped his hands together upon the crown of his hat, and held it close down to his head, that all men might see how odious that flattery was to him, and the very approbation of the person, though at that time most popular.

"When there was any overture or hope of peace, he would be more erect and vigorous, and exceedingly solicitous to press any thing which he thought might promote it; and, sitting among his friends, often, after a deep silence, and frequent sighs, would

with a shrill and sad accent, ingeminate the word peace, peace, and would passionately profess that the very agony of the war, and the view of the calamities and desolation the kingdom did and must endure, took his sleep from him, and would shortly break his heart. This made some think, or pretend to think, that he was so much enamoured on peace that he would have been glad the King should have bought it at any price, which was a most unreasonable calumny; as if a man that was himself the most punctual and precise in every circumstance that might reflect upon conscience or honour could have wished the King to have committed a trespass against either. And yet this senseless scandal made some impression upon him, or at least he used it for an excuse of the daringness of his spirit; for at the leaguer before Gloucester, when his friends passionately reprehended him for exposing his person unnecessarily to danger (for he delighted to visit the trenches and nearest approaches, and to discover what the enemy did) as being so much beside the duty of his place that it might be understood rather to be against it, he would say merrily that his office could not take away the privilege of his age, and that a Secretary in war might be present at the greatest scene of danger; but withal alledged seriously that it concerned him to be more active in enterprises of hazard than other men, that all might see that his impatiency for peace proceeded not from pusillanimity, or fear to adventure his own person.

"In the morning, before the battle, as always upon action, he was very chearful, and put himself in the first rank of the Lord Byron's regiment, then advancing upon the enemy, who had lined the hedges on both sides with musqueteers, from whence he was shot with a musket in the lower part of the belly, and, in the instant falling from his horse, his body was not found till the next morning, till when there was some hopes he might have been a prisoner, though his nearest friends, who knew his temper, received small comfort from that imagination. Thus fell that incomparable young man, in the four and thirtieth year of his age, having so much dispatched the true business of life that the