THE

LIFE AND DEATH

OF

Sir MATTHEW HALE, Knight,

LATE

LORD CHIEF JUSTICE

OF

THE COURT OF KING'S BENCH.

THE

PREFACE.

'NO part of history is more instructive and delighting, than the lives of great and worthy men: 'the shortness of them invites many readers, and 'there are such little and yet remarkable passages

in them, too inconsiderable to be put in a general 'history of the age in which they lived, that all 'people are very desirous to know them. This 'makes Plutarch's Lives to be more generally read, 'than any of all the books which the ancient Greeks or Romans writ.

But the lives of heroes and princes are com'monly filled with the account of the great things done by them, which do rather belong to à gene'ral than a particular history; and do rather amuse the reader's fancy with a splendid shew of great

ness, than offer him what is really so useful to 'himself; and indeed the lives of princes are either 'writ with so much flattery, by those who in'tended to merit by it at their own hands, or ' others concerned in them; or with so much spite, 'by those who, being ill-used by them, have re

venged themselves on their memory, that there ' is not much to be built on them; and though the 'ill-nature of many, makes what is satirically writ to be generally more read and believed, than 'when the flattery is visible and coarse, yet cer'tainly resentment may make the writer corrupt 'the truth of history as much as interest; and 'since all men have their blind sides, and com'mit errors, he that will industriously lay these 'together, leaving out, or but slightly touching, 'what should be set against them to balance them, 6 may make a very good man appear in very bad colours: so upon the whole matter there is not that reason to expect either much truth, or great instruction, from what is written concerning 'heroes or princes; for few have been able to imitate the patterns Suetonius set the world in writing the lives of the Roman emperors, with the same freedom that they had led them: but the lives of private men, though they seldom entertain the reader with such a variety of passages as the other do; yet certainly they offer him things that are more imitable, and do present "wisdom and virtue to him, not only in a fair idea, 'which is often looked on as a piece of the invention or fancy of the writer, but in such plain ' and familiar instances, as do both direct him better, and persuade him more; and there are not such temptations to bias those who writ them, so that we may generally depend more on the truth ' of such relations as are given in them.

"In the age in which we live, religion and virtue 'have been proposed and defended with such ad

vantages, with that great force of reason, and 'those persuasions, that they can hardly be matched in former times; yet after all this, there are but few much wrought on by them, which perhaps flows from this, among other reasons, that there are not so many excellent patterns set out, as might both in a shorter and more effectual manner recommend that to the world, which discourses do but coldly; the wit and style of the 'writers being more considered than the argument 'which they handle, and therefore the proposing 'virtue and religion in such a model, may perhaps operate more than the perspective of it can do; ' and for the history of learning, nothing does so 'preserve and improve it, as the writing the lives ' of those who have been eminent in it.

'There is no book the ancients have left us, which 'might have informed us more than Diogenes Laertius's lives of the philosophers, if he had had 'the art of writing equal to that great subject 'which he undertook; for if he had given the world 'such account of them, as Gassendus has done of 'Peiresk, how great a stock of knowledge might

we have had, which by his unskilfulness is in a 'great measure lost; since we must now depend ' only on him, because we have no other, or better ' author that has written on that argument.

For many ages there were no lives writ but by 'monks, through whose writings there runs such 'an incurable humour of telling incredible and 'inimitable passages, that little in them can be believed or proposed as a pattern. Sulpicius Seve