Bulstrode Whitelocke (1605-1676) has few pretensions to rank as a man of letters; but his _Memorials_ are far too valuable a source of historical information to be omitted from a survey of the literature of the period. The author, a barrister and a Templar, was elected to the Long Parliament in 1641, and appointed chairman of the committee for drawing up the charges against Strafford. He held various offices under the Parliament, and was employed in negotiations with Charles, of whose execution he disapproved. He was subsequently a member of the Council of State, and one of the commissioners of the Great Seal. In 1653 he was sent on an embassy to Sweden, which he has described in a valuable work. During the confused period between the death of Cromwell and the Restoration he was successively a commissioner of the Great Seal and a member of the Council of State. He had some difficulty in obtaining pardon at the Restoration; but ultimately Charles II. admitted him to his presence, and received him graciously, with a speech which Whitelocke's biographer thinks extraordinary, but which appears very sensible: 'Mr. Whitelocke, go into the country; don't trouble yourself any more about state affairs; and take care of your wife and your sixteen children.' Whitelocke profited by the royal admonition, and died at a good old age. His _Memorials_ extend from 1625 to 1659, and are a valuable body of material, being for most of the time a diurnal record of all occurrences of importance. They are the student of history's indispensable companion for the period, but aim at no more exalted position in literature than that of a matter-of-fact register. Another diarist of a similar description to Whitelocke, but not, like him, a busy actor in the scenes which he describes, is Narcissus Luttrell (1657-1732), a scion of the well-known family of Luttrell of Dunster, Somersetshire. Luttrell, who was a man of literary and antiquarian tastes, and the collector of the Luttrell Ballads, now in the British Museum, kept a diary from 1675 to 1714, which attracted little attention until Macaulay's frequent references to the MS. induced the University of Oxford to publish it in 1857.