Characters from the Histories & Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century
History
Characters from the Histories & Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century
Great Britain -- Biography; Great Britain -- History -- Stuarts, 1603-1714
a quicker progresse into the greatest imployments and trust, made him
more transported with disdayne of other men, and more contemninge the
formes of businesse, then happily he would have bene, if he had mett
with some interruptions in the beginning, and had passed in a more
leasurely gradation to the office of a Statesman. He was no doubte of
greate observation, and a piercinge judgement both into thinges and
persons, but his too good skill in persons made him judge the worse
of thinges, for it was his misfortune to be of a tyme, wherin very few
wise men were æqually imployed with him, and scarce any (but the L'd
Coventry, whose trust was more confined) whose facultyes and abilityes
were æquall to his, so that upon the matter he wholy relyed upon
himselfe, and decerninge many defects in most men, he too much
neglected what they sayd or did. Of all his passyons his pryde was
most prædominant, which a moderate exercise of ill fortune might have
corrected and reformed, and which was by the hande of heaven strangely
punished, by bringinge his destruction upon him, by two thinges, that
he most despised, the people, and S'r Harry Vane; In a worde, the
Epitaph which Plutarch recordes, that Silla wrote for himselfe, may
not be unfitly applyed to him; That no man did ever passe him, ether
in doinge good to his frends, or in doinge mischieve to his enimyes,
for his Actes of both kindes were most exemplar and notorious.
[Footnote 1: 'old' inserted in another hand before 'L'd'.]
18.
By SIR PHILIP WARWICK.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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