'In such company our Trimmer is not ashamed of his name, and willingly leaves to the bold champions of either extreme the honour of contending with no less adversaries than nature, religion, liberty, prudence, humanity, and common sense.'
Burnet might well be puzzled by a man who 'seemed to have his head full of Commonwealth notions,' and yet concurred in the worst measures of Charles II.
The most important of Halifax's other essays are his advice to his daughter, excellent for sense and curious as an illustration of the manners of the age, and his character of Charles II., nicely balanced between half-sincere censure and half-sarcastic apology. There is nothing in Charles's history to refute Halifax's view of him as a man whose master passion was the selfish love of ease; but much to prove that his abilities and discernment were far greater than Halifax chooses to allow. Halifax's aphorisms, as usual, are too numerous to attain a uniformly high standard, but some are exceedingly good.
'Malice may be sometimes out of breath, Envy never. A man may make peace with hatred, but never with envy.
'An old man concludeth from his knowing mankind that they know him too, and that maketh him very wary.
'He that leaveth nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things.'
An allusion in these aphorisms to the Bank of England proves that Halifax went on writing till nearly the hour of his death in 1695. Of his other writings, the most remarkable is the _Advice to a Dissenter_ (1687), a masterly dissuasive against abetting the illegalities of James.
Possibly, when Halifax penned the last-quoted aphorism, he was thinking of Sir William Temple, well known to him at the council-board, of whom Macaulay says, 'It was his constitution to dread failure more than he desired success.' This elegant writer, whom we have already met as an historian and as a speculator upon government, for once did a rash thing when he entered into the controversy respecting the comparative merits of the ancient and modern writers, knowing little of either. Macaulay has done full justice to the ignorance and carelessness of this well-worded composition; but Macaulay has said nothing of its extraordinary want of insight. Temple need not be blamed for having been unable to make up his mind whether the blood circulated, and whether the earth went round the sun (the Grand Duke Cosmo found Cambridge disputing against the latter proposition in 1669); what is really astonishing is that he should have been utterly blind to the stupendous consequences which Giordano Bruno had pointed out a century before. 'If they are true,' he says, 'yet these two great discoveries have made no change in the conclusions of astronomy, nor in the practice of physic, and so have been of little use to the world, though perhaps of much honour to the authors.' After this, Temple's essays are not likely to be referred to in quest of intellectual wisdom, and their chief value, apart from the purity and elegance of their style, consists in their illustrations of contemporary opinions and practices. This is especially the case with the essay on _Health and Long Life_. Temple enumerates with suppressed amusement the various sanatory fads he has known, among which he seems to reckon tea and coffee. Unconsciously confirming an anecdote of Charles II. and his physicians, related by Evelyn, he tells us that Peruvian bark was at first received with prejudice and suspicion, but was becoming rehabilitated in his day, and fairly confounds us by his faith in 'that little insect called millepedes; the powder whereof, made up into little balls with fresh butter, I never knew fail of curing any sore throat.'