As a consequence he has little that is good to say of anyone,
and rarely mentions one of his contemporaries but to tap the sources of
a picturesque invective. After all, it is possible to make excuses for
him. He was at once a man of thought and a man of action--a
combination as rare as it is usually deplorable. The man of action in
him might have gone far had he not been ruined at the outset by the man
of thought. A magnificent seaman, he might have become Lord High
Admiral of England but for a certain proneness to intrigue.
Fortunately for him--since otherwise he could hardly have kept his
head where nature had placed it--he came betimes under a cloud of
suspicion. His career suffered a check; but it was necessary to afford
him some compensation since, after all, the suspicions could not be
substantiated.
Consequently he was removed from his command and appointed by the
Queen's Grace her Lieutenant of Cornwall, a position in which it was
judged that he could do little mischief. There, soured by this
blighting of his ambitions, and living a life of comparative seclusion,
he turned, as so many other men similarly placed have turned, to seek
consolation in his pen. He wrote his singularly crabbed, narrow and
superficial History of Lord Henry Goade: his own Times--which is a
miracle of injuvenations, distortions, misrepresentations, and
eccentric spelling. In the eighteen enormous folio volumes, which he
filled with his minute and gothic characters, he gives his own version
of the story of what he terms his downfall, and, having,
notwithstanding his prolixity, exhausted this subject in the first five
of the eighteen tomes, he proceeds to deal with so much of the history
of his own day as came immediately under his notice in his Cornish
retirement.
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