By one single piece, the duke of Buckingham did both great service to his age and honor to himself.

The earls of Mulgrave, Dorset, and Roscommon wrote in a good taste; but their productions are either feeble or careless.

The marquis of Halifax discovers a refined genius; and nothing but leisure and an inferior station seem wanting to have procured him eminence in literature.
Of all the considerable writers of this age, Sir William Temple is almost the only one that kept himself altogether unpolluted by that inundation of vice and licentiousness which overwhelmed the nation.

The style of this author, though extremely negligent, and even infected with foreign idioms, is agreeable and interesting.

That mixture of vanity which appears in his works, is rather a recommendation to them.