"Learned Selden," learned in civil and political wisdom as were few of
his great contemporaries. If his book of Table Talk has less repute
than Bacon's famous Essays, like that, opened anywhere, it displays
the author's eminent discretion, his comprehensive understanding,
apposite illustration of his theme. His homely, familiar manner, has
its attractions as well for the scholar as for the common reader;
pregnant as are his sentences with his great good sense, rare learning,
bringing abstruse subjects home to the affairs of life in a style at
once perspicuous and agreeable. "He was a person," says Lord Clarendon,
"whom no character can flatter, or transmit in any expressions equal
to his merit. He was of such stupendous learning in all kinds of
languages that a man would have thought he had been entirely conversant
among books, and had never spent an hour but in reading and writing.
Yet his humanity, courtesy, and affability were such, that he would
have been thought to have been bred in the best courts, but that his
good-nature, charity, and delight in doing good, and in communicating
all he knew, exceeded his breeding. His style in all his writings seems
harsh, and sometimes obscure, which is not wholly to be imputed to
the abstruse subjects of which he commonly treated, but to a little
undervaluing of style, and too much propensity to the language of
antiquity; but in his conversation he was the most clear discourser,
and had the best faculty of making hard things easy, and of presenting
them to the understanding, of any man that hath been known."
Coleridge, who never let any person of eminence, in thought or
erudition, escape his attention, says: "There is more weighty bullion
sense in this book (The Table Talk) than I ever found in the same
number of pages of any uninspired writer."