His style is prolix and redundant, and suffocates us by the length of its periods: but it discovers imagination and sentiment, and pleases us at the same time that we disapprove of it.

He is more partial in appearance than in reality for he seems perpetually anxious to apologize for the king; but his apologies are often well grounded.

He is less partial in his relation of facts, than in his account of characters: he was too honest a man to falsify the former; his affections were easily capable, unknown to himself, of disguising the latter.

An air of probity and goodness runs through the whole work; as these qualities did in reality embellish the whole life of the author.

He died in 1674, aged sixty-six.
These are the chief performances which engage the attention of posterity.