"Eminent as he was in council, it is as the historian of his time that Clarendon will be ever remembered. His book has its faults and limitations, no less than the masterpieces of Thucydides and Tacitus. Those who look upon history as a mere means of strengthening the Whig position will doubtless convict Clarendon of monstrous partiality, and it may be confessed that he thought it no part of his duty to look back upon events with the eyes of a Roundhead. It has been pointed out that he had little sense of natural scenery or of history's dramatic elements. He did not set the persons of his drama against any background, natural or artificial. His world has not houses, nor courts, nor fields. The personages of his drama seem to move hither and thither in vast, vacant spaces. He was interested supremely in men, not things, in the conflict of wills and the passions of the mind. Above all, he was interested in character. History for him was ‘character in action,’ and as he had known all the actors in the drama which unfolded itself before his eyes, and in which he had played a foremost part, he could measure their motives and discern their traits."