ABSTRACT
JOHN SELDEN WAS ONE OF ENGLAND’S most learned men. His contemporaries in the long Parliament seem to have regarded him ‘somewhat in the light of a valuable piece of national property, like a museum, or a great public library’.1 Scholars and statesmen, both in and out of Parliament, sought his advice on questions which covered the whole compass of legal and historical learning. The range of Selden’s scholarship was impressive even to his close friends, who were themselves giants of erudition. Archbishop Ussher eulogized Selden in his funeral sermon by declaring that he himself felt scarce worthy to carry Selden’s books after him. Men as diverse in temperament as Dr. Johnson and Coleridge found in his Table Talk enduring wisdom behind the chisel edge of wit. The Table Talk was, indeed, an incomparable expression of Selden’s profoundly rational and disciplined intelligence.
