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THIS author is in most particulars the worst qualified for an historian that ever I met with. His style is rough, full of improprieties, in expressions often Scotch, and often such as are used by the meanest people[1]. He discovers a great scarcity of words and phrases, by repeating the same several hundred times, for want of capacity to vary them. His observations are mean
- ↑ His own opinion, however, was very different, as appears by the original MS. of his History, wherein the following lines are legible, though among those which were ordered not to be printed: "And if I have arrived at any faculty of writing clear and correctly, I owe that entirely to them [Tillotson and Lloyd]; for as they joined with Wilkins in that noble though despised attempt, of an Universal Character, and a Philosophical Language, they took great pains to observe all the common errours of language in general, and of ours in particular. And in drawing the tables for that work, which was Lloyd's province, he looked farther into a natural purity and simplicity of style, than any man I ever knew. Into all which he led me, and so helped me to any measure of exactness of writing, which may be thought to belong to me." The above was originally designed to have followed the words "I knew from them," vol, i, p. 191, l. 7, fol. ed. near the end of A. D. 1661.
and
