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 few things ill, but he will do very few things.’ During the ten years following his resignation, a period blackened by great political infamy, Temple lived fastidiously to himself, and practised unfashionable virtues. It is much to say of a statesman of that age that, although comparatively poor and not unworldly, he was untainted by corruption. The revolution, a crisis at which, with his peculiar qualifications, he might have played a part scarcely less prominent than that of Clarendon in 1660, found him still amid ‘the gardens of Epicurus,’ deploring the foibles (he was much too well bred to denounce the treacheries) of contemporary politicians.

As a writer, apart from a weakness for gallicisms, which he admitted and tried to correct, his prose marked a development in the direction of refinement, rhythmical finish, and emancipation from the pedantry of long parentheses and superfluous quotations. He was also a pioneer in the judicious use of the paragraph. Hallam, ignoring Halifax, would assign him the second place, after Dryden, among the polite authors of his epoch. Swift gave expression to the belief that he had advanced our English tongue to as great a perfection as it could well bear; Chesterfield recommended him to his son; Dr. Johnson spoke of him as the first writer to give cadence to the English language; and Lamb praises him delightfully in his ‘Essay on the Genteel Style.’ During the eighteenth century his essays were used as exercises and models, and down to Sir James Macintosh the best judges had the highest opinion of Temple's style. But the marked progress made during the last century in the direction of the sovereign prose quality of limpidity has not been favourable to Temple's literary reputation, and in the future it is probable that his ‘Letters’ and ‘Memoirs’ will be valued chiefly by the historian, while his ‘Essays’ will remain interesting primarily for the picture they afford of the cultured gentleman of the period. A few noble similes, however, and those majestic words of consolation addressed to Lady Essex, deserve and will find a place among the consecrated passages of English prose.

Of the portrait of Temple by Sir Peter Lely, painted in 1679 and now in the National Portrait Gallery, there are engravings by P. Vanderbank, Houbraken (, plate 67), George Vertue, Anker Smith, and others. That by Houbraken is the best rendering of this portrait, which depicts a very handsome man, with a resolute mouth, rather fleshy face, and small moustache, after the Dutch pattern. The British Museum possesses what appears to be a contemporary Dutch pencil sketch of the statesman. Another portrait is in the master's lodge at Emmanuel College. Two further portraits by Lely of Temple and his wife, belonging to Sir Algernon Osborn, bart., of Chicksands Priory, are reproduced in ‘Letters of Dorothy Osborne’ (1888).

[The Life, Works, and Correspondence of Sir William Temple, bart., by Thomas Peregrine Courtenay [q. v.], in two volumes, 1836, 8vo, is in many respects a pattern, although, it being the work of a tory pamphleteer, Macaulay virtually damned it with faint praise in his famous essay on Sir William Temple in the Edinburgh Review. Upon the few points in which the essay diverges from Courtenay's conclusions (as in the estimate of triple alliance) modern opinion would not side with Macaulay. The chief original authorities, besides Temple's works, with Swift's prefaces and his diplomatic papers in the British Museum (Addit. MSS. 9796–804 and Stowe MS. 198), are Boyer's Life of Sir William Temple, 1714, and the life by Lady Giffard, prefixed to the 1731 edition of the Works. Eight of Temple's original letters are in the Morrison Collection of Autographs, catalogue, vi. 233–40. See also Letters of Arlington, 1701, 8vo (vol. ii. is almost wholly occupied by the letters to Temple from July 1665 to September 1670); Lodge's Peerage, ed. Archdall, v. 239; Prinsterer's Archives de la Maison Orange-Nassau, 2me série, 1861, v. passim; Boyer's Life of William III, pp. 11, 36, 41, 60–2, 67, 83, 90, 92–3, 96; Bulstrode Papers, 1898, pp. 10, 17, 40, 45, 54, 59, 68, 74, 107, 112, 123, 195, 265, 307; Clarendon's Life and Continuation, 1827; Clarendon Corresp. ed. Singer, 1814; Sidney's Diary, ed. Blencowe, p. lxxxviii; Burnet's Own Time, 1833; Burnet's Letters from Switzerland, 1686, p. 295; Wynne's Life of Jenkins, 1724; Letters to Sir Joseph Williamson, 1874; Boyer's William III; Trevor's Life and Times of William III, 1834; Baillon's Henriette Anne d'Angleterre, p. 300; Pylades and Corinna, 1732, vol. ii. Letter V (containing an allegorical character of Temple); Strickland's Queens of England, vol. vii.; Flassan's Diplomatie Française, 1811; St. Didier's Hist. des Nég. de Nimègue, 1680; Dumont's Corps de Diplomatie; Mignet's Nég. relatives à la Succession; Lettres de M. le Comte d'Estrades, 1743; Campbell's Memoirs of De Witt, 1746; Lefèvre Pontalis's Jean de Witt, Paris, 1884, i. 447 sq.; Luttrell's Brief Hist. Relation; Ranke's Hist. of England; Seeley's Growth of British Policy, 1895; Masson's Milton, vi. 315, 569, 601; Craik's Life of Swift; Forster's Life of Swift, vol. i.; Mémoires de Trévoux, November 1707 and March 1708; Niceron's Mémoires, xiii. 148; Mémoires of Dangeau and St. Simon; Prime's Account of the Temple Family, New York, 1896; Lipscomb's Buckinghamshire, iii. 85–6; Retrospective Review, vol. viii.; note kindly furnished by E. S. Shuckburgh, esq., fellow of Emmanuel.] 

TEMPLE, WILLIAM JOHNSTONE or JOHNSON (1739–1796), essayist, and friend of Gray and Boswell, was the son of