The Lives of Hale, Bedell, and Rochester: With Fell's Life of Dr. Hammond (Classic Reprint) - nouveau livre

Excerpt from The Lives of Hale, Bedell, and Rochester: With Fell's Life of Dr. Hammond

No part of history is more instructive and delighting, than the lives of great and worthy men: the shortness of them invites many readers; and there are such little and yet remarkable passages in them, too inconsiderable to be put in a general history of the age in which they lived, that all people are very desirous to know them. This makes Plutarch's Lives be more generally read than any of all the books, which the ancient Greeks or Romans writ.

But the lives of heroes and princes are commonly filled with the account of the great things done by them, which do rather belong to a general than a particular history, and do rather amuse the reader's fancy with a splendid show of greatness, than offer him what is really so useful to himself: and indeed the lives of princes are either writ with so much flattery, by those who intended to merit by it at their own hands, or others concerned in them; or with so much spite, by those who, being ill used by them, have revenged themselves on their memory, that there is not much to be built on them. And though the ill-nature of many makes what is satirically writ to be generally more read and believed, than when the flattery is visible and coarse; yet certainly resentment may make the writer corrupt the truth of history, as much as interest.

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