Page:A Dissertation on Reading the Classics and Forming a Just Style.djvu/245

Rh, and I must ﬁnish Sir Walter's Character with declaring my Opinion, that his admirable Performance in such a prodigious Undertaking, sheweth, that if he had attempted the History of his own Country, or his own Times, he would have excelled even Livy and Thucydides; and the Annals of Queen Elizabeth by his Pen, without diminishing from the serious, judicious Cambden, had been the brightest Glory of her Reign, and would have transmitted his History as the Standard of our Language even to the present Age: For certainly the Writers in that glorious Reign, and the beginning Rh