Book Description

Excerpt from An Abridgment of Bishop Burnet's History of His Own Times "It seems," said Horace Walpole, speaking of Burnet and his "History of My Own Times," "as if he had just come from the King's closet or from the apartments of the men whom he describes, and was telling his readers, in plain honest terms, what he had seen and heard." So plain and honest, indeed, and so free-spoken, was Bishop Burnet's chronicle, that, realizing its certain effect on his contemporaries, he arranged that it should not be published for six years after his death. He died in 1715; and it was not actually published till 1723, eight years afterwards. It led to a great outcry, in which the voice of Swift was heard, with a Jacobite chorus sustaining the burden. "His Secret History," said Swift, "is generally made up of coffeehouse scandals... his vanity runs intolerably through the whole book... He is the most partial of all writers that ever pretended so much to impartiality." Pope, too, derided Burnet's egotistic style in his "Memoirs of P. P., Clerk of this Parish." But the vehemence of the criticism is the measure of the life and lifelikeness of the work. For the latter half of the seventeenth and the opening of the eighteenth century, the History is a familiar mirror of the clearest kind, though no doubt the medium has here and there a deflecting warp or flaw. Gilbert Burnet was born in Edinburgh in 1643, son of an Episcopalian father and a Presbyterian mother. He was a great and eloquent preacher; was Preacher of the Roll's Chapel, and Lecturer of St. Clement's, until he was inhibited by Charles II., after Burnet had attended Lord William Russell to the scaffold, and written his significant record of that event. He became Bishop of Salisbury on his return to England in 1688-9, after his exile at the Hague. His "History of the Reformation" is the other work by which he is best remembered to-day. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.