"Learned Selden," learned in civil and political wisdom as were few of his great contemporaries. If his book of Table Talk has less repute than Bacon's famous Essays, like that, opened anywhere, it displays the author's eminent discretion, his comprehensive understanding, apposite illustration of his theme. His homely, familiar manner, has its attractions as well for the scholar as for the common reader; pregnant as are his sentences with his great good sense, rare learning, bringing abstruse subjects home to the affairs of life in a style at once perspicuous and agreeable. "He was a person," says Lord Clarendon, "whom no character can flatter, or transmit in any expressions equal to his merit. He was of such stupendous learning in all kinds of languages that a man would have thought he had been entirely conversant among 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, and in communicating all he knew, exceeded his 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, but to a little undervaluing 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 of making hard things easy, and of presenting them to the understanding, of any man that hath been known." Coleridge, who never let any person of eminence, in thought or erudition, escape his attention, says: "There is more weighty bullion sense in this book (The Table Talk) than I ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer." Ben Jonson addressed him thus:-- ... "You that have been Ever at home, yet have all countries seen, And like a compass keeping one foot still Upon your centre, do your circle fill Of general knowledge.... I wondered at the richness, but am lost To see the workmanship so excel the cost! To mark the excellent seasoning of your style, And manly elocution! not one while With horror rough, then rioting with wit, But to the subject still the colors fit, In sharpness of all search, wisdom choice, Newness of sense, antiquity of voice! I yield, I yield. The matter of your praise Floods in upon me, and I cannot raise A bank against it; nothing but the round Large clasp of nature such a wit can bound." One's pen cannot be better drawn across paper, than in transcribing some of his wise and pithy sayings:-- "_Books._ 'Tis good to have translators, because they serve as a comment, so far as the judgment of the man goes."