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THE LIFE

OF

SIR MATTHEW HALE, KNT.

LATE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE OF ENGLAND.

BY

GILBERT BURNET, D. D.

LORD BISHOP OF SARUM.

En France, on ne lit guère un ouvrage, que pour en parler.'

MAD. DE STAEL.

The same remark, I am sorry to say, is becoming more and more applicable to our own country.'

DUGALD STEWART.

BISHOP BURNET'S 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 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 commonly filled with the account of the great things done by them; which do, rather, belong to a general, than a particular history; and do rather amuse the reader's fancy with a splendid show of greatness, 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 intended 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 revenged 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, certainly, resentment, as much as interest, may make the writer corrupt the truth of history. And, since

all men have their blind sides, and commit errors, he that will industriously lay these together, leaving out, or but slightly touching, what should be set against them to balance them, may make a very good man appear in 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 write 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 advantages, 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 writer 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 an 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

* Gassendi, born at Provence, in France, 1592: Peiresc, born at Beaugensier, in the same country, 1580.

'Gassendi gave the life of Peiresc, in elegant Latin; one of those delightful works, which exhibit a striking likeness of a great and good man, at full length, and show every feature, and fold of the drapery, in the strongest and clearest light.'

Peiresc was, manifestly, a favourite with Burnet. In his Own Times,' we meet the following passage: 'He,' Sir Robert Murray, 'was the most universally beloved and esteemed, by men of all sides and sorts, of any man I have ever known in my whole life. He was a pious man; and, in the midst of armies and courts, he spent many hours a day in devotion. He had gone through the easy part of mathematics, and knew the history of nature, beyond any man I ever yet knew. He had a genius much like Peiriski, as he is described by Gassendi.' Burnet. Own Times, i. 101.

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