But, so far as this insincerity was shown in the course of his troubles, it was a failing which untoward circumstances are apt to produce, and which the extreme hypocrisy of many among his adversaries might sometimes palliate. Few personages in history, we should recollect, have had so much of their actions revealed, and commented upon, as Charles; it is perhaps a mortifying truth that those who have stood highest with posterity, have seldom been those who have been most accurately known. The turn of his mind was rather peculiar, and laid him open with some justice to very opposite censures--for an extreme obstinacy in retaining his opinion, and for an excessive facility in adopting that of others. But the apparent incongruity ceases, when we observe that he was tenacious of ends, and irresolute as to means; better fitted to reason than to act; never swerving from a few main principles, but diffident of his own judgment in its application to the course of affairs. His chief talent was an acuteness in dispute; a talent not usually much exercised by kings, but which the strange events of his life called into action. He had, unfortunately for himself, gone into the study most fashionable in that age, of polemical theology; and, though not at all learned, had read enough of the English divines to maintain their side of the current controversies with much dexterity. But this unkingly talent was a poor compensation for the continual mistakes of his judgment in the art of government and the conduct of his affairs.[385]