had been Secretary to Sir Philip Sidney, and his father, Sir John Temple, had married the sister of the celebrated Dr. Hammond, rector of Penshurst. At the age of seventeen he was sent to Emanuel College, Cambridge, where he remained till 1648; and the two following years of his life were passed in travelling on the continent. In 1654 he married the daughter of Sir Peter Osborne, an amiable, talented, and excellent woman, to whom he had been long engaged; and the next five years of his life were passed in happy and studious retirement in Ireland, from which he was summoned by the restoration of the king, in 1660, to engage in those scenes of public and political strife for which he was never really qualified by disposition or by habit. The fifteen years that followed were the active and busy years of his life, in the course of which he was frequently employed, either as envoy or ambassador, at different courts and places, at the Hague, at Aix-la-Chapelle, and at Nimeguen, ranking high in reputation generally as a diplomatist, but acquiring much the greater portion of his fame by his successful management of the celebrated treaty, known by the name of the Triple Alliance, between England, Holland, and Sweden, against France. This treaty was concluded in 1668,
