As a writer of contemporary history, Clarendon has given us the form and color of the time.

The book is in title and handling a Royalist history.

Its faults are manifest: first those of partisanship; and secondly, those which spring from his absence, so that much of the work was written without an observant knowledge.

His delineation of character is wonderful: the men of the times are more pictorially displayed than in the portraits of Van Dyk.

The style is somewhat too pompous, being more that of the orator than of the historian, and containing long and parenthetic periods.