he would not sign the treaty, and the ambassador was recalled, and died at Madrid on the point of setting out for England. Life III. 582.

SIR NICHOLAS HYDE, LORD CHIEF JUSTICE OF ENGLAND, UNCLE TO LORD CLARENDON,

DIED MDCXXXI.

HE was a man of excellent learning for that province he was to govern, of unsuspected and unblemished integrity, of an exemplary gravity

* He had a promise to be secretary of state, in which he was disappointed; and was afterwards recalled from his embassy to make way for the earl of Sandwich. The memoirs of Sir Richard Fanshawe, and the sufferings of his family for the crown, exquisitely written by his wife (one of the daughters of Sir John Harrison, of Balls, Knt.) who with her sister Margaret (married to Sir Edm. Turnor of Stoke-Rochford, co. Lincoln, Knt.) were the constant attendants of Sir Richard throughout the civil war, are in the possession of the family, and might, from the interesting matter they contain, prove an acceptable present to the public. See the Europ an Magazine for 1792.

and austerity, which was necessary for the manners of that time, corrupted by the marching of armies, and by the licence after the disbanding them; and though upon his promotion some years before (1626) from a private practicer of the law, to the supreme judicatory in it, by the power and recommendation of the great favorite, of whose counsel he had been, he was exposed to much envy and some prejudice; yet his behaviour was so grateful to all the judges, who had an entire confidence in him, his service so useful to the king in his government, his justice and sincerity so conspicuous throughout the kingdom, that the death of no judge had at any time been more lamented. He died of a malignant fever, gotten from the infection of some gaol in his summer circuit. Life I. II.

HENRY HYDE, FATHER TO LORD CLARENDON-
DIED MDCXXXII.

HE wanted about six weeks of attaining the age of seventy, and was the greatest instance of the

felicity of a country life that was seen in that age; having enjoyed a competent, and to him a plentyful fortune, a very great reputation of piety and virtue, and his death being attended with universal lamentation. It cannot be expressed with what agony his son bore his loss, having, as he was used to say, "not only lost the best father, but the best friend, and the best companion he ever had or could have;” and he was never so well pleased, as when he had fit occasions given him to mention his father, whom he did in truth be. lieve to be the wisest man he had ever known; and he was often heard to say in the time when his condition was at the highest," that though God Almighty had been very propitious to him, in raising him to great honours and preferments, he did not value any honour he had so much as the being the son of such a father and mother, for whose sakes principally he thought God had conferred those blessings upon him." Life I. 18.

BEN JONSON- DIED MDCXXXVII.

HIS name can never be forgotten, having by his very good learning, and the severity of his nature and manners very much reformed the stage, and indeed the English poetry itself. His natural advantages were, judgment to order and govern fancy, rather than excess of fancy, his productions being slow and upon deliberation, yet then abounding with great wit and fancy, and will live accordingly and surely as he did exceedingly exalt the English language in eloquence, propriety, and masculine expressions; so he was the best judge of and fittest to prescribe rules to poetry and poets, of any man who had lived with, or before him, or since; if Mr. Cowley had not made a flight beyond all men, with that modesty yet, to ascribe much of this, to the example and learning of Ben Jonson. Life I. 30.

JOHN SELDEN DIED MDCLIV.

HE was a person whom no character can flatter, or transmit in any expressions equal to his merit and virtue, he was of so stupendous a learning in all kinds, and in all languages (as may appear in his excellent and transcendant writings) that a man would have thought he had been entirely conversant amongst books, and had never spent an hour but in reading and writing; yet his humanity, courtesy, and affability were such, that he would have been thought to have been bred in the best courts, but that his good nature, charity, and delight in doing good exceeded that breeding. His style in all his writings seems harsh and sometimes obscure; which is not wholly to be imputed to the abstruse subjects of which he commonly treated, out of the paths trod by other men; but to a little undervaluing the beauty of style, and too much propensity to the language of antiquity; but in his conversation he was the most clear discourser, and had the best faculty in making hard things easy, and presenting them to the understanding, of any man that hath been