CRITICS who attempt to test the merits of Sallust as a historian by modern methods declare that his works are unreliable and that he took no pains to verify his statements when he might easily have done so. Even if this is accepted against him, he has remaining the same extraordinary merit which gives its chief value to the historical work of his pupil, Clarendon. He is an essayist on Character of the first rank. Clarendon learned from him to interject in his history such essays as those on Hampden and Cromwell which make the “History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England” a classic. The same method descends through Clarendon to Macaulay. By means of it, the historian rises above his duty as a chronicler and becomes at once a historian and a dramatist, recalling from the past the great men who made the present, and passing them before us in review as the dramatist passes his characters in flesh and blood across the stage. Before Clarendon’s time, no English historian had developed sufficient strength of creative imagination to succeed in this as Clarendon succeeds in showing us his friends and his enemies of the Civil War. We may feel that he is showing men at their best or at their worst, but we feel that in either event, they are alive with the real vitality given them by his genius.

  He was born in Wiltshire, England, February 18th, 1608. In the quarrel between Charles I. and Parliament, he was at first a leader of the popular party and one of Hampden’s strongest supporters, but the ascendancy of the Puritans and their determination to abolish Episcopacy, drove him over to the king. During the Protectorate, he was in exile with Charles II. After the Restoration, he became lord chancellor de facto as he had been nominally during the Protectorate, but in 1667 he was impeached by his enemies and deserted by the king, who allowed him to be driven into exile. He died at Rouen, December 9th, 1674.