The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VII. Cavalier and Puritan.
§ 10. Gilbert Sheldon
Next to Sanderson may very fitly be named “his dear old friend Dr. Sheldon,” one of those capable and strenuous men of business who, from time to time, have seemed marked out early in life—as Clarendon tells us was said of him—for the primacy of all England. No man was more bitterly criticised during the later years of his life than he, for he was a masterful exponent of the Clarendon policy. His literary remains, which are almost exclusively letters, still rest, for the most part in manuscript, in the Bodleian library; they are thoroughly in keeping, as regards manner and style, with the acute sobriety of his character, and a most valuable volume might be compiled from them. His only printed work is a sermon preached before Charles II just after the restoration, markedly in the style of Laud.
It is more than literature that links the names of Laud, Sanderson and Sheldon. The latter, who, early in life, had opposed the great archbishop in some of his university reforms and had been prominent, for example, in resisting the appointment of Jeremy Taylor to an Oxford fellowship, lived not only to carry on with a certain rigid determination the policy of the earlier primate but to assist in the preservation and publication of the memorials of his life.