No More Learning

The originality of the work was
questioned in his own day: 'Some say The Pilgrim's Progress is
not mine'; but he will have none of this : ‘Manner and matter,
too, was all mine own, nor was it unto any mortal known till I had
done it. The whole and every whit is mine. ' When the vision
descended on him it surprised no one more than himself. He
tells us that he was writing another book about the way and race
of saints in his own day, when he
Fell suddenly into an Allegory
About their Journey, and the way to Glory.
Vivid fancies came so thick and fast upon him, that he resolved
to put them down;
This done, I twenty more had in my Crown,
And they again began to multiply,
Like sparks that from the coals of fire do fly.
It has been said that The Pilgrim's Progress was the last English
book written without thought of the reviewer ; its author goes
further, and tells us it was written without thought even of a
possible reader:
I did not think
To shew to all the World my Pen and Ink
. . . nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my Neighbour; no not I;
I did it mine own self to gratifie.
This is the author's own account of the growth of his great master-
piece, and it goes far to account for its possession of that charm
which lays hold of the hearts of men, they know not how.
But, while the book thus sprang into being, effortless and fair
like a flower, it is not wanting in proportion or dramatic unity.


## p. 175 (#191) ############################################

The Pilgrim's Progress 175
The opening sentence lays hold of the reader, and, thenceforward,
there is no unmown grass of weariness to wade through, no
wilderness of tedium in which to wander. There are episodes
by the way, but they never draw us so far aside that we forget
the main story-on the contrary, they contribute to its effect.
The book is remarkable, too, for the reality of its impersonations,
for the rapidity and power with which its characters are drawn.
They are no mere shadowy abstractions moving about in a mystical
region far away from us, but real men and women living in our
own every-day world. By a few strokes only, sometimes by the
mere giving of a name, an abstraction rises up before us, clothed
in flesh and blood. A contemporary tells us that Bunyan was
'accomplished with an excellent discerning of persons, and it is
this keen power of insight that gives permanent value to his
work. He had the discriminating eye and, also, the broad sympathy
and keen sense of humour which accompany that gift. Further,
while he gives us quaint turns of thought, pithy expressions
such as still linger on many a countryside, and revelations of
character, which we recognise at once, the world of outside nature,
with its manifold phases, comes in to complete the whole. We
have the hill with its toilsome ascent, the mountain with its far-off
vision of the city, the fearsome glen with its shadowy shapes.
Then, at other times, we walk in the King's gardens, into which
the children of the land of Beulah go to gather nosegays for the
pilgrims, bringing them with much affection. ' Our senses, too, are
regaled with the fragrance of spikenard and saffron, calamus and
cinnamon, with trees of 'frankincense, myrrh, together with aloes
with all chief spices. And, through the interlacings of green
'
leaves, we hear, besides, the melodious notes of the country birds
and the sweet sound of distant bells.
As to Bunyan's subsequent influence on English life and
literature, it is to be remembered that, above everything else, his
desire was to be a religious teacher, that it would have been
against his conscience to aim at mere literary distinction and
It would have gratified him beyond expression could
he have known that The Pilgrim's Progress is one of the
few books which act as a religious bond for the whole of
English Christendom. As a creator of fictitious personalities, he
has charmed the world, weaving them into a story of universal
interest and lasting vitality. The most perfect and complex
of fairy tales, as Hallam called the book, it has not only
won the hearts of children at an age when its spiritual
6
success.


## p. 176 (#192) ############################################

176
Yohn Bunyan
>
6
meaning is little perceived, but it has also been the inter-
preter of life to men perplexed with life's problems. This is
the great merit of the book,' said Dr Johnson, 'that the most
cultivated man cannot find anything to praise more highly, and
the child knows nothing more amusing’; and even Swift could
testify that he had been better entertained and more improved
by a few pages of this allegory than by more pretentious books
of another kind. Still, the literary class, as a whole, did not
at the time, or long after, give the book appreciative welcome.
Cowper was afraid to introduce Bunyan's name into his poetry
lest he should provoke a sneer. Addison, in disparaging fashion,
said that he never knew an author that had not his admirers, for
Bunyan pleased as many readers as Dryden or Tillotson ; and
Mrs Montague, following in his wake, called Bunyan and Quarles
'those classics of the artificers in leather,' laughing at them as
forming the particular entertainment of her neighbours, the
Kentish squires. On the other hand, Mrs Piozzi asks, 'Who shall
say that Lillo, Bunyan and Antonio Correggio were not naturally
equal to Jonson, Michael Angelo and the Archbishop of Cambrai? '
And Horace Walpole evidently thought he was paying Edmund
Spenser a compliment when he spoke of him as 'John Bunyan
in rhyme. '
While the learned class differed widely in judgment, the general
world of readers never wavered in their favourable estimate of
the book. Between 1678, when it first appeared, and 1778, thirty-
three editions of part I and fifty-nine editions of parts I and II
together were issued, and then publishers left off counting. It is
computed that one hundred thousand copies were sold in Bunyan's
own lifetime. Nor was its literary influence confined to his own
country. Three years after its publication, it was reprinted by
the puritan colony in America, there receiving, as Bunyan himself
tells us, much loving countenance. ' And there it has continued
ever since, in untold number of editions; and, with Shakespeare,
it forms part of the literary bond which unites the two English-
speaking peoples on each side of the Atlantic.
Bunyan's allegory was translated into Dutch and French in
1682. The first edition in German appeared in 1694, many
successive editions following in its wake.
F. H. Ranke tells us
that, as a young man at Nürnberg, he met with a copy of an
edition of 1703, translated from the Dutch, which made such an
impression upon him that he formed classes of young men for the
study of the book; and Gustav Kettner suggests that, in two


## p. 177 (#193) ############################################

The Holy War
177
of Schiller's poems, Der Pilgrim and Die Sehnsucht, Bunyan's
influence is distinctly traceable. Jung-Stilling also records with
wbat pleasure he read the book; Wieland, too, after telling an
English traveller at Weimar how The Pilgrim's Progress had
delighted him, went on to say, 'In that book I learned to read
English ; English literature had great influence upon me, your
puritan writings particularly. '
Other translations of Bunyan's dream have gone on multiplying
down to the present time. There are now versions of The Pilgrim's
Progress in no fewer than one hundred and eight different languages
and dialects, so that it is no mere poetical figure to say, as has
been said, that it follows the Bible from land to land as the singing
of birds follows the dawn.
Between 1656, when he gave his first book to the world, and
1688, when, a few weeks before his death, he saw his last book
partly through the press, Bunyan sent forth, altogether, no fewer
than sixty different publications as the product of his pen. While
all these may be truly said to bear more or less the stamp and
impress of his genius, there are four outstanding books which,
by common consent, are recognised as surpassing all the rest
in impressiveness and creative powerGrace Abounding, The
Pilgrim's Progress, The Holy War and The Life and Death
of Mr Badman. It is generally agreed that, in point of personal
interest and popular power, The Holy War contrasts unfavour-
ably with the story of Christian and Christiana. Still, in the later
book, also, there are fine passages and lofty conceptions, though
it moves in a more abstract region than its predecessor. It is
interesting, also, as throwing light upon Bunyan's own military
experiences. The martial deeds of the various captains engaged
in the siege of Mansoul are, doubtless, reminiscences of days in
Newport garrison when he came in contact with the preaching
and praying majors and captains of the parliamentary army.
Apart from these things, however, Macaulay’s verdict, as we all
know, was that, if The Pilgrim's Progress had not been
written, The Holy War would have been our greatest English
allegory.
The remaining work-The Life and Death of Mr Badman
-though disfigured by grotesque stories and somewhat coarse
passages, yet bears the characteristic marks of Bunyan's genius
and is, admittedly, a work of power. He himself intended this
book to be the companion picture to that of his dream; as the
12
E. L. VII.
CH, VII.


## p. 178 (#194) ############################################

178
John Bunyan
one set forth the progress of a Christian from this world to glory,
the other was to present the life and death of the ungodly, their
travel through this world to perdition. It is constructed on a
different plan, the former being in continuous narrative, and this
in dialogue form, disfigured by didactic discourses on the various
vices of a bad man's life. It is a picture of low English life as
Bunyan saw it with his own eyes in a commonplace country town
in the degraded days of a licentious king, and, as such, it has its
historical value. Froude has given a forcibly expressed estimate
of the work. To him it is a remarkable story:
The drawing is so good, the details so minute, the conception so unex-
aggerated that we are disposed to believe that we must have a real history
before us. But such supposition is only a compliment to the skill of the
composer. Throughout we are on solid earth, amidst real experiences.
Bunyan conceals nothing, assumes nothing, and exaggerates nothing. There
the figure stands : a picture of a man in the rank of English life with which
Bunyan was most familiar, travelling along the primrose path to the everlasting
bonfire, as the way to Emmanuel's Land was through the Slough of Despond
and the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
In passing from John Bunyan to Andrew Marvell we are
conscious of making a great transition. There is a sense in
which they have both been classed as puritans—Bunyan as the
great puritan allegorist and Marvell as the one puritan of his
age besides Milton who acquired distinction in poetry. They may
even, through literary association, have been personally known
to each other, for Nathanael Ponder, the first publisher of The
Pilgrim's Progress, was also, about the same time, publisher of
the second part of Marvell’s Rehearsal Transprosed. But, if we
class both as puritans, we must do so with a difference ; for, when
Marvell was born, in 1621, his father was parson of the parish of
Winestead in Holderness, and all his life, as his son tells us, he
was 'a conformist to the rules and ceremonies of the Church of
England, though, I confess, none of the most over-running and
eager in them. ' Moreover, this somewhat measured description
of the ecclesiastical standing-place of the elder Andrew may very
well be applied, also, to that of the younger. It is true that he
was for three years tutor in the family of lord Fairfax, the parlia-
mentary general, that he was Milton's assistant as Latin secretary
to Cromwell and that he was in close personal association with
many parliamentarians ; but it is also true that he numbered
among his friends prince Rupert and Richard Lovelace. And,
while he wrote an Ode upon Cromwell : Return from Ireland, it
must be remembered that in the same ode occur the memorable


## p. 179 (#195) ############################################

Andrew Marvell
179
stanzas descriptive of Charles I's kingly bearing on the scaffold,
recording how
He nothing common did, or mean,
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe's edge did try.
Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate bis helpless right;
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.
Then, too, it may be further said that, though in strenuous and
earnest language he resisted the attempts of Parker, afterwards
bishop of Oxford, to stir up persecution against nonconformists,
he himself expressly declares that he was not in the nonconformist
ranks, that he merely wrote, to use his own words, what I think
befits all men in humanity, Christianity, and prudence towards
dissenters. '
Marvell, born 31 March 1621, was educated at the Hull
grammar school, of which his father became master in 1624, and,
at the age of twelve, by the aid of an exhibition attached to the
school, entered Cambridge, where he matriculated as a sizar of
Trinity college, 14 December 1633. On 13 April 1638 he was
admitted a scholar of his college and took his B. A. degree the
same year.
His contributions to literature may be classified as con-
sisting mainly of his Poems, which, for the most part, belong to
the years 1650–2; the Satires, which he wrote on public men
and public affairs in the reign of Charles II ; the News-letters,
which he regularly addressed to his constituents in Hull after his
election as M. P. for the borough in 1659, and which extend from
1660 to the time of his death in 1678; and his Controversial
Essays on ecclesiastical questions, written at intervals between
1672 and 1677.
It is upon his poems that Marvell's literary reputation mainly
rests ; yet, curiously enough, these were scarcely known at all to
his own contemporaries. Some of them were circulated in MS
after the manner of the time, and were probably read by Milton
and other personal friends; but, with few exceptions, they were
not given to the world in printed form till three years after his
death, when the small folio of 1681 appeared. Three or four
fugitive pieces were printed earlier. Two poems, one in Greek
and the other in Latin, addressed to the king, appeared as early
12-2


## p. 180 (#196) ############################################

180
Andrew Marvell
as 1637 in Musa Cantabrigiensis; an occasional poem was printed
in Lachrymae Musarum in 1649 ; one was prefixed to Lovelace's
Poems the same year; and one to a new edition of Milton's
Paradise Lost in 1671.
Marvell, like his friend Milton and other educated Englishmen,
set forth on the accustomed course of European travel when he was
twenty-one. From 1642 to 1646, he was abroad in Holland, France,
Italy and Spain ; but, beyond the fact that he was in Rome in 1645,
we know nothing of his movements during these four years, save
that Milton testifies that he spent them to very good purpose and
the gaining of those four languages. ' From 1646, he passes out of
sight till we find him again at Nun Appleton house in Yorkshire,
the seat of lord Fairfax, where, from 1650 to 1652, he acted as
tutor to Fairfax's daughter Mary, a girl of twelve. Nun Appleton
house, where Marvell thus came to reside for a while, is situated
in the Ainsty of York, in a pleasant tract of country watered by
the Ouse, the Wharfe and the Nidd. It was, indeed, an ideal
place for a poet, for there nature seemed to conspire with genius
to bring to perfection the flowering time of the poet's life; and
it was here, under lord Fairfax's roof, that, so far as literature was
concerned, Marvell did his best and most enduring work. Judging
by the dates concerned, we may conclude that the first product
of his pen, at this time, was the Horatian Ode upon Cromwells
Return from Ireland; and the title itself suggests one powerful
influence which had much to do with the development of Marvell's
poetic gift. Though classed among the poets of the reign of
Charles II, it is generally recognised now that he really belongs
to the earlier time, that his true place is with Herrick, Lovelace
and Wither, rather than with Waller, Sedley, Dorset or Rochester.
And, while he came under the influence of Donne, an influence
paramount during the years of his Cambridge life, he, like Milton,
was earliest shaped by his classical training, especially by his
study of Horace, his chosen companion and friend. Of his first
really great work, the Horatian Ode, it has been said that, better
than anything else in the language, it gives an idea of a grand
Horatian measure, moving, as it does, from end to end, with the
solemn beat of its singular metre, strophe and antistrophe with
the epode following. All its stanzas combine force with grace
and originality with charm, leading Palgrave to say of it that it
is 'beyond doubt one of the finest in the language, and more in
Milton's style than has been reached by any other poet. '
Then, too, at a time when poets were not conspicuous for their


## p. 181 (#197) ############################################

The Garden
181
6
love of nature herself, except so far as she could furnish similes
and illustrations for poetic use, Marvell was an anticipator of
Wordsworth in his sheer enjoyment of open air and country
life for enjoyment's sake. In this, also, the influence of the
Roman poet may, possibly, be seen. We have foregleams of
some of Marvell's most beautiful poems in the second of
Horace's Epodes, where he tells us how delightful it is to be
among the sheep, the bees, the vines and fruit trees of his
farm among the Sabine hills, and where he confides to us how
willingly he would leave the luxuries of the city for the peaceful
surroundings and charm of country life. In like manner, Marvell
encamps his mind among trees and gardens where the world
toucheth him not, and exclaims, in joyous freedom of soul,
Bind me, ye woodbines in your twines,
Curle me about, ye gadding vines.
In his delight in gardens, fields and woods, he is the poet
of the open air and the country-side. In his poem entitled The
Garden, it has been well said that 'he throws himself into the
very soul of the garden with the imaginative intensity of Shelley
in The West Wind. ' Here he has found Fair Quiet and Innocence
her sister dear. No city life for him.
Society is all but rude
To this delicious solitude.
Wondrous is the life to be lived here, where
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The lascious clusters of the vine,
Upon my month do crush their wine;
The nectaren and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
and where, when he tries to pass, he is ensnared with flowers.
The Garden is composed in the short lines of the octosyllabic
couplet. It is free, however, from the diffuseness which the facility
of this form of composition too easily favours, possibly from the
fact that it is an English version of lines first composed in Latin
by Marvell himself: the classical mould exercising restraint upon
mere unchartered freedom. Yet there is in it, in spite of this
restraint, the poet's genuine love of gardens and woods, of birds
and flowers.
Yet he is no merely sensuous epicure, even in his delight in
nature. His poem entitled The Coronet shows he is not insensible
how, in human life, the real ever falls short of the ideal; and, in his
Dialogue between the Soul and the Body, he makes us realise the


## p. 182 (#198) ############################################

182
Andrew Marvell
meaning of the struggle evermore going on between the lower
passions and the higher nature of man. In the similar Dialogue
between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure, also, the chorus
comes in with the lofty strain proclaiming that
Earth cannot show so brave a sight,
As when a single soul does fence
The batteries of alluring Sense.
In another poem, also, there is a beautiful simile, where the
orient dew, shed from the bosom of the Morn into the blowing
roses,' is by the warm sun exhaled back to the skies and so
becomes the symbol of a soul,
that drop, that ray,
Of the clear fountain of eternal day,
in its upward ascent to its eternal source. In other poems, besides,
we find not only grace and sweetness but, also, that high and
excellent seriousness which Aristotle asserts to be one of the grand
virtues of poetry, the high seriousness which comes of absolute
sincerity. There is one other poem which, composed some five
years after the Nun Appleton period, and combining delicacy and
depth of feeling with charm of melody, should not escape notice.
It is entitled Bermudas, and is descriptive of the experiences of
friends of bis who, in the days of Laud, were exiled to these islands
for conscience' sake. Though banished, they were not desolate,
for, as in their boat and by these shores they
rowed along,
The list'ning winds receivd their song.
It was a song of praise to Him who had led them through the
wat'ry maze, and, safe from the storms and prelat's rage,' had
brought them to a land of eternal spring, a land where, for
them, the very rocks
did frame
A temple, where to sound His name.
Thus sung they, in the English boat,
An holy and a cheerful note;
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.
While Marvell's poems were published in collected form in
1681, his Satires on the court and the court party, for obvious
reasons, remained unpublished till the revolution of 1688 had
become an accomplished fact. First circulated in MS, or, in some
cases, printed clandestinely, in 1689 they appeared in collected


## p. 183 (#199) ############################################

Marvell's Satires
183
form under the title Poems on Affairs of State, and throw curious
light on the history of the reigns of Charles II and James II, the
politics, manners and scandals of the time. As an example, take
the one described as An Historical Poem. When Clarendon saw
with a smile the wild rejoicings that greeted the return of king
Charles on his progress from Dover to London, he could not but
wonder, he said, where those people dwelt who had done all the
mischief, and kept the king so many years from enjoying the
comfort and support of such excellent subjects. In the satire
referred to, Marvell expresses his own feelings in humorous
fashion also, as he describes the king as :
Of a tall stature and of sable hue,
Much like the son of Kish, that lofty Jew,
Twelve years complete he suffered in exile,
And kept his father's asses all the while.
While these Satires came from Marvell’s pen long after the poems
of the Nun Appleton period, they were, in fact, a return to his
earliest form, for, when in Rome, in 1645, he wrote the lampoon
on Richard Flecknoe, an Irish priest, which is remembered now
only as having suggested the satire by Dryden in 1682 on the
laureate Shadwell. In Paris, also, somewhat later, Marvell wrote
a satire in Latin on a French abbé, whom he pronounced a
charlatan for undertaking to delineate character and prognosticate
fortune from the sight of a man's handwriting. In turning to
this form of literature he was but following in the wake of others
whose work has been discussed in a previous chapter of the
present work?
When we consider the main body of Marvell’s Satires, ex-
tending from about 1667 to the end of his life, we come to the
conclusion that it was as a patriot that he became a satirist.
Embittered by the degradation of his country in the disgraceful
days when Dutch ships of war were actually sailing up the Medway,
and feeling the hopelessness of anything like reform while cor-
ruption, open and shameless, reigned in the court and in public
departments, in trenchant fashion he assailed the abuses against
which he and the nobler spirits in the nation were contending.
His longest rimed satire of 1667, dealing with the Dutch wars, is
called Last Instructions to a Painter, a title derived from Waller's
panegyric poem, and is believed to have been first published
anonymously as a broadsheet in the August of that year. The
painter, whom he is supposed to be instructing, is to picture the
1 See ante, vol. IV, chap. XVI.


## p. 184 (#200) ############################################

184
Andrew Marvell
state as being without a fleet, and as being led by men whom
neither wit nor courage did exalt; he is to lay bare the dissolute-
ness of the court, and the dishonesty of state officials who follow
their leader, for he commands that pays; he is to show how, while
the Dutch their equipage renew,' the English navy yards lie idle,
the
6
orders run,
To lay the ships up, cease the keels begun;
meantime, store and wages find their way to the pockets of men
who are the obsequious lackeys of the court-'the ships are
unrigged, the forts unmanned, the money spent. ' These keen
home-thrusts were keenly felt by some of those whom they most
concerned. Pepys, himself a government official, felt compelled
to own their truth. In his Diary, under date 16 September, he
writes— Here I met with a fourth Advice to a Painter upon the
coming in of the Dutch and the End of the War, that made my
heart ake to read, it being too sharp and so true. ' There were
other satires of the same trenchant sort, and it has been said that
Marvell's merciless dissection of the blunders and intrigues of the
time led to the fall of lord Clarendon, with all the consequences
which that memorable event entailed.
Marvell’s prose works consist of a long series of Neus-letters,
which he wrote daily to his constituents on the doings in parlia-
ment, and also of certain controversial works to which he felt
impelled by his love of fair play. The letters were discovered
in the archives of the town of Hull by Edward Thompson and
published by him in 1776. They are continuous from 1660 to
1678, with the exception of a break of two years when he was
abroad in 1661, and another hiatus in 1671, and they throw
valuable historical light upon the proceedings in parliament at
a time when parliamentary reports had not yet begun. His chief
prose work, of another character, was his Rehearsal Transprosed.
The title of the book was suggested by a passage in the duke of
Buckingham's farce called The Rehearsal, which was the talk of
the town. It occurs in one of the scenes where Bayes (meaning
Dryden) speaks of what he calls his rule of transversion, by which
he says he takes a book, and, if it be prose, he puts it into verse,
and, if verse, he turns it into prose. To which Jonson replies that
a process of putting verse into prose should be called transprosing.
Marvell caught up this word, using it as part of the title of his book,
in which he held up to ridicule the writings of Samuel Parker,
one of the worst specimens of the ecclesiastics of Charles II's


## p. 185 (#201) ############################################

Present Day Verdict
185
reign. Bishop Burnet tells us that Parker, in reply to several
virulent books,
was attacked by the liveliest droll of the age, who wrote in a burlesque strain
read with pleasure from the king down to the tradesman. He not only
humbled Parker but the whole party. The author of the Rehearsal Trans-
prosed had all the men of wit, (or, as the French phrase it,) all the laughers,
on his side.
Yet, with all the grace and humour that light up his pages, there
was in Andrew Marvell a deep vein of serious earnestness; and in
his writings we find, not only wit and banter, but, also, passages of
powerful advocacy of great truths and of defence of public rights
wantonly violated. In other words, there was the puritan strain
in him, a spirit which resented and resisted unrighteousness and
wrong.
When we consider the number of editions of Marvell's Poems
issued between 1681 and 1776, it cannot be said that his works
lacked appreciation when they first appeared, and yet, in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century, they seem to have passed out
of sight, to be rediscovered in the century following. In a sonnet
of 1802, Wordsworth spoke of Marvell as one of the great men
there have been among us
hands that penned
And tongues that uttered wisdom-better none;
ranked him with those who called Milton friend,' who 'knew how
genuine glory was put on,' and who taught us
what strength was, that would not bend
But in magnanimous meekness.
Six years later, Charles Lamb, with his usual fine taste, appreci-
ated what he called the 'witty delicacy' of Marvell’s poems, and
others who have come after have endorsed this judgment, so that
it may be said that, after two centuries and a half, this seventeenth
century writer has come to his own, and 'is winning as high a
place as poet as he occupied as a patriot. '
6


## p. 186 (#202) ############################################

CHAPTER VIII
HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL WRITINGS
I
STATE PAPERS AND LETTERS
In the period of English history covered by this volume, the
system of government under which the nation still had its being s
was, in a great measure, determined, while the religious movement
which dominated the great conflict of the age deeply influenced,
for centuries to come, the principles followed by Englishmen in
their social relations and in the conduct of their lives. In such
times, when the minds of men are constantly strung up to action,
and when history, as the phrase runs, is being made every day,
there cannot but be a great storage, accompanied by an inevitable
waste, of historical materials. Now, materials of history, as such,
cannot claim to form part of historical literature, although some
of them-many speeches and letters, for instance-may often
possess artistic qualities entitling them to be included in it. Again,
much that is ostensibly meant to find a place among historical
works is often designed by the writer with a political intent;
while, in some exceptional instances, political writings, by virtue
of their dignity and fulness, come to rank as historical classics.
In an age when the two branches of composition were not only
inextricably interwoven, but, more or less consciously, confounded,
with each other; in which biographies and personal memoirs were
frequently written for public or party ends; while private letters
were habitually written for wide circles of readers; while speeches
were, at times, drawn up as summaries of long and complicated
public transactions—an exact classification of historical and
political writings under accepted heads becomes extremely diffi-
cult. Yet, obvious distinctions being kept generally in view, it
may prove possible both to illustrate the remarkable accumulation
in this period of materials for historical and political research and


## p. 187 (#203) ############################################

Rushworth's Collections
187
study, and to show to what degree the national literature was
directly enriched by contemporary efforts in the corresponding
fields of literary production. It is not, however, purposed in any
part of this or the following chapter to attempt more than a
selection, for mention or for comment, of writings marked out
as possessed of typical or individual interest.
The first great collection of English state papers is that of
John Rushworth, who was appointed clerk-assistant to the House
of Commons in April 1640, and secretary to the council of war
in 1645. Whatever may have been their political bias, his labours,
if only because of their priority to all others in the same field in
England, would deserve the lasting gratitude of all students of
English history. But his Collections of Private Passages of State,
Weighty Matters in Law, and Remarkable Proceedings in Five
Parliaments, of which the first volume, extending from 1618 to
1629, was published in the year before the restoration, were no
mere tentative beginning. The author's design was both com-
prehensive and deeply thought out. Being desirous of furnishing
a faithful account of the contention between the advocates of pre-
rogative and those of liberty which 'gave the Alarm to a Civil
War,' and for which he was in possession of an unusual abundance
of materials", he resolved to devote his attention mainly, though
not exclusively, to the domestic struggle, and, since, with regard to
this, he found forgery and fiction rampant in the unbridled
pamphlet literature of the age, to make the documents on which
his narrative was based the substantial part of his work. Thus,
in this and the following seven volumes of this edition (of which
the last, not published till 1680, ends with the trial of Strafford),
he set the first example of pragmatic history to be found in our
literature, and reviewed, under the searchlight of first-hand evi-
dence, a period whose records ran the risk of being permanently
distorted by a partisanship that cleft the very depths of the
national life?
The most important body of authentic materials for the history
of both the domestic and the foreign policy of Oliver Cromwell,
is the Collection of the State Papers of secretary John Thurloe
1 See post, chap. xv, as to Rushworth’s newspaper called The London Post.
? How erroneous it would be to suppose Rushworth’s Collections to be a dry series
of business documents, is shown, e. g. , by the extremely interesting narrative by arch-
bishop Abbot of his own sequestration (1627) reported in vol. 1 of the Stuart Tracts 17
(1903) from The English Garner, which includes not only a clear, and, in the circum-
stances, fair, account of the system of Laud, but, also, a curious sketch of the rise of
Buckingham.
in


## p. 188 (#204) ############################################

188
Historical and Political Writings
(1616—68), which extends from the year 1649 to the restoration,
with the addition of some papers belonging to the last eleven years
of Charles I. Against Thurloe, an 'antidote,' if it is to be so called,
was posthumously supplied in the important collection known as
the Clarendon State Papers preserved in the Bodleian and
calendared in three volumes. The first of these volumes, which
reaches to the year 1649, deals, to a great extent, with docu-
ments collected for the use of Clarendon when he was writing
the earlier books of his History of the Rebellion, together with
his own letters and the correspondence of his secretary Edgeman.
The second volume is concerned with copies of Charles II's dis- 7. 3
guised correspondence with members of the royal family and
royalists in England, and a series of newsletters addressed to
Edgeman by Richard Watson, an ejected fellow of Caius college,
and a similar series sent from London to Sir Edward Nicholas at
a
the Hague. The third contains a list of the state papers of the
years 1655 to 1657-records of plots and negotiations for the
restoration of the king, of which only a small proportion had been
previously printed.
If it is not always easy to discriminate between the public and
private letters of sovereigns, or of their ministers and agents at
home and abroad, and other important functionaries of state, this
difficulty often becomes an impossibility in the period now under
review. So long as the personal authority of the sovereign was
the very essence of the existing system of government, the sense
of that authority dominated all his communications, whether with
members of the royal family or with others; while a more or less
direct personal relation to the sovereign seemed to pervade
despatches, reports and letters of all kinds on business of state.
This feature finds abundant illustrations in the letters, noted
below, of ambassadors of the type of Sir Henry Wotton; and,
no doubt, some of the mental characteristics of James I led his
diplomatists to adapt their communications to the idiosyncrasy
of the recipient. The king's curiosity was endless, and his sagacity
fell little short of his curiosity; he loved a good story and was
quick in understanding the point of a joke?
But it should also
be remembered that the early Stewart age had inherited from the
Elizabethan a prose diction intent upon the display of two qualities
not always mutually reconcileable-amplitude and point; so that
few men and women, least of all those whose epistles were likely
to pass through a succession of hands, sat down to write a letter
1 See bibliography as to The Prince's Cabala.


## p. 189 (#205) ############################################

Cromwell's Letters
189
without the desire of leaving it, when done, a finished production
in the way of style.
The letters of queen Henrietta Maria, including her corre-
spondence with the king, have been collated by Mrs Everett
Green from both the English and the French archives. Though,
in the case of the daughter of Henri IV, everything turned to
failure as, with him, most things ended in success, and, though,
with the best of intentions, her efforts largely contributed to
aggravate the misfortunes of her consort, she was a true daughter
of the one, as she was, in another sense, the true wife of the
other, king. Her letters have a style of their own, which, in the
earlier among them, is accentuated by her pretty broken English.
As the toils close round the king and she is perpetually urging
him to burst through them, the letters to her 'dear heart' gain in
intensity what they lose in charm. The correspondence, which
ought to have come to a close with her joyful message to her son
on his restoration—if you are torn to pieces in England with
“kindness," I have my share of it also in France'-drags to a
weary end, full of the miseries of money troubles and veiled
personal mysteries which seem still not to have been quite set
at rest.
A few words may seem in place here on the letters, and the
speeches, of Oliver Cromwell, which are alike familiar to modern
readers in Carlyle's subjective presentment. As Mrs Lomas, the
latest editor of these remains, puts the matter, Cromwell was an
accurate writer; and this makes it both possible and desirable
to restore the actual text of his letters. But the case is quite
different with the speeches; here, we have only what Cromwell
is reported to have said, sometimes taken down in shorthand only,
and often under disadvantages of time and place.
On the other hand, the frankness with which his thoughts are
laid bare as his sense of responsibility to the Divine source of
authority causes him to ignore all other considerations prevails
more and more completely as the speeches progress ; while such
is not the case with the letters. On the contrary, some of the
early letters, from the point of view of sincerity, are more 'con-
vincing' than a diplomatic communication to Mazarin or a mandate
to Cambridge university. Yet, as a whole, Cromwell's letters,
which, when necessity obliged, were matter-of-fact and businesslike,
are full of those touches of intimacy and those suggestions of indi-
vidual conviction which give to a letter its true charm and its real
force. Cromwell, if one may so put it, was a born letter-writer.


## p. 190 (#206) ############################################

190 Historical and Political Writings
Fairfax seems to have left to him the task of drawing up despatches
to Speaker Lenthall describing victorious actions; and Carlyle and
Gardiner agree that it was Cromwell himself who composed the
fateful manifesto of the army to the city of London. Few more
powerfully written state papers exist than the declaration of the
lord lieutenant of Ireland (in reply to the Roman Catholic council
of Kilkenny, 1650), though its account of earlier Irish history may
be regarded as more than doubtful'. Nothing, in its way, could
be more dignified than his message accepting the Oxford vice-
chancellorship’, or, again, more broad-minded than his advice to
his son Richard to recreate himself with ‘Sir Walter Raughley's
History' Among Cromwell's speeches, it is a difficult task to
select the most noteworthy. But it may not be amiss to direct
attention to two of them, as typical of his treatment of some of
the problems with which, in the course of his career, he found
himself face to face. In the great speech to the Barebones
parliament“, he raises a whole edifice of theory as to the elo-
quence of words and that of deeds; and the speech challenging
the confidence of his own first parliament is an unmistakably able
pronouncement, especially in reference to his own position.
Probably the most trustworthy text of any of his speeches is
that of the speech against the Levellers, revised by himself as
delivered in January 1655º.
The value of ambassadorial despatches as materials of history
was recognised at an early date. According to Bacon? , they are
ad historiam pretiosissima supellex ; and, in Sir George Carew's
introduction to his Relation of the State of France, addressed
to James I on Carew's return from his embassy to Henri IVS, the
original letters and papers of leading actors in the management
of affairs are described as the only true and unerring sources
of history. But, though Sarpi (father Paul), the illustrious
'
historian of the council of Trent (1619), by his use of materials of
this nature, had already set an example which, before long, was to
be followed by English historical writers, it had not occurred to
the statesmen and diplomatists of the reigns of Elizabeth and
James I to publish, or allow to be published, their works' of this
description; and, had it occurred to them, they would probably
soon have been made to change their minds.
6
1 Vol. II, pp. 5 ff. (Mrs Lomas's edition).
3 Vol. 11, p. 54.
• Vol. 11, pp. 339 ff.
? De Augmentis (1623).
2 Vol. 11, p. 180.
• Vol. , pp. 272 ff.
8 Vol. II, p. 405.
8 Printed in Birch's Negotiations.


## p. 191 (#207) ############################################

Sir Dudley Digges
191
It may be disputed whether the golden age of English diplo-
macy should be placed in the years in which the great queen was
warily staving off, though she knew it to be inevitable, the critical
struggle with Spain, or in the reign of her successor, confident,
almost to the last, of his ability to gain by negotiation the European
authority which he was unprepared to assert by the alternative
method of blood and iron. But it is certain that few publications
of diplomatic history have exercised a greater effect than one
which was given to the world in 1654, when a new epoch was
opening in English foreign policy and the protector's military
state, after asserting itself as the dominant great power of Europe,
seemed about to become the head of a protestant alliance holding
the balance in both hemispheres? . It was at this time that there
appeared in print a posthumous publication by Sir Dudley Digges,
late master of the rolls (1583-1639), entitled The Compleat
Ambassador: or Two Treaties of the Intended Marriage of Qu.
Elizabeth of Glorious Memory. In this work, the history of the
negotiations as to the Anjou and Alençon matches carried on
during Walsingham's embassy (1570—3, dates covering that of the
massacre of St Bartholomew) became public property in the shape of
the despatches of Walsingham, and the replies of Burghley, Leicester
and Sir Thomas Smith. No similar revelation had hitherto taken
place in England, where, notwithstanding the assiduous exertions
of James. I's diplomatists, very little attention had been paid to
their activity by outsiders. But the publisher, encouraged by the
success of Cabala”, a curious medley of letters and papers of the
reigns of James and Charles I which appeared in 1654, anticipated
a great success for his experiment, and was not deceived. The
time was propitious for a study of the diplomatic processes of the
most aggressively protestant of queen Elizabeth's ambassadors,
whose policy of securing the alliance of France against Spain was
just about to experience a revival. Thus, the book, having rapidly
gone into a second edition, was, in due course, translated into
French, and came to be repeatedly cited in Wicquefort's celebrated
manual, L'Ambassadeur et ses Fonctions
Sir Henry Wotton, of whose writings some general account has
been given in a previous volume", was one of the most accomplished,
1 Cf. Stäblin, K. , Sir Francis Walsingham und seine Zeit (Heidelberg, 1908),
vol, i, ad fin.
: As to his and his son's pamphlets, see bibliography.
• To be distinguished, of course, from The Prince's Cabala.
• See vol. iv, pp. 163–4, ibid. bibliography, p. 484.


## p. 192 (#208) ############################################

192
Historical and Political Writings
as he was one of the most voluminous, letter-writers of his age.
Many of his letters are printed in the successive editions of
Reliquiae Wottonianae ; but a very large number has been added
by the zeal of his most recent biographer'. In the case of a con-
siderable portion of these letters, it is useless to seek to distinguish
between what is of the nature of private or of public information.
Intended primarily for the eye of his royal master, Wotton's semi-
official letters blend the report of high affairs of state and the offer
of grave political advice with table-talk. Of this he was a master;
he practised it to perfection with the members of his embassy
at Venice, and he seasoned it with a great deal of wit. The
genial humour of his later years, when, in his Eton provostship,
he had found such mental repose as is possible to an active spirit,
was, necessarily, of slower growth.
While, as a diplomatist, Wotton exercised, at least at Venice,
a stronger influence than quite suited his master's policy, his
literary ambition, except in a poetic gem by which it would have
surprised him to find himself most widely remembered, never
carried him far in the direction of achievement. His authorship
of The State of Christendom, a survey of the political world in
1594, still remains doubtful, and, as a historian, he never accom-
plished more than the Characters of Essex and Buckingham, with
Some Observations by way of Parallel; a short Life and Death
of the former favourite; a Latin Panegyrick of King Charles,
written at Eton not long before his death, and, among a few other
fragments or incidental pieces, a page of an intended History of
Venice, which no man could have seemed either by experience or
by insight more competent to write. The history of England from
Henry VIII, which it was the wish of Charles I that Wotton should
execute, he never seems to have taken in hand. In the world
of letters, he was a man of projects, as in that of politics he was
a man of designs--and it is this perennial freshness of mind which,
added to the nobility of his aims and the grace of his style, makes
him a delightful letter-writer.
A species of correspondents which is more fully discussed
elsewhere in this volume? , cannot be altogether passed by in the
present connection. 'Intelligencers,' as they were called, played
a part of some importance in the earlier Stewart period. They
1 The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton (1907) by Logan Pearsall
Smith.
See chapter on The Beginnings of English Journalism, post.


## p. 193 (#209) ############################################

Intelligencers. Private Letters
193
>
were professed writers of news employed by ambassadors residing
abroad, or by persons of consequence at home, to furnish them
with a continuous budget of news concerning events in England
and in other countries. Obviously, the value of these communica-
tions was enhanced, if private letters could be added from persons
connected with the court and likely to be au courant of its secrets
or, at all events, of its gossip, or from others filling important
positions abroad. It is of such 'intelligence' as this that is com-
posed the collection transcribed by T. Birch from various sources
and published from his MSS in the British Museum under the
title The Court and Times of James I. The most prolific
'intelligencer' in this collection is John Chamberlain, who is
responsible for not less than 116 in the first, and 122 in the
second, volume. Most of his letters are addressed to Carleton,
to whom, when in Paris, all but one letter of another series are
likewise addressed. Chamberlain's letters, or many of them,
possess some of the qualities of later journalism, without some
of their defects. Their news includes gossip of all sorts, but
they are straightforward in statement, while their simplicity of
style must have refreshed diplomatists, who had 'oratory' enough
to compose on their own account. It must not be forgotten that
these were private letters intended for private recipients, and that
the freedom of comment which makes them pleasant reading would
not have been possible under any other circumstances!
Letters in which public and private ingredients intermix were
familiar already to the Elizabethans, as they must be to every age
in which a sense of form has come to affect all varieties of written,
and not a few of spoken, composition. Bacon, as is known, was a
great letter-writer and owed something of the strength which he
shows even in this relatively loose branch of writing to the example
of his mother. This lady identified herself to an extraordinary
degree with the interests of her sons, though her puritanism was of
a hard flawlessness to which neither of them could attain. Bacon
himself was in so many respects greater than his age that the chief
significance of his own priceless letters lies in their biographical
value. But the light which they throw on affairs of state in which
he was an actor, or of which he was an interested spectator, or (as
i Francis Osborne, the author of Advice to a Son and other easy-going manuals
of knowledge and conduct, declares, in the first-named work, that it is an Office
unbecoming a Gentleman to be an Intelligencer, which in real Truth is no better
than & Spie. '
? See her letters in Spedding's Letters and Life, vol. 1, pp. 110 ff.
13
E. L. VII.
CH. VIII.


## p. 194 (#210) ############################################

194
Historical and Political Writings
in the early Essex episode ) something of both, is of the utmost
importance for the historical student; and the fact that, in not a
few of these letters, Bacon appears as a keen politician nurtured in
the Elizabethan traditions of a patriotic hatred of Spain, is only
part of their general evidence showing the many-sidedness of his
nature, by no means alien from the sympathies and antipathies
common to those around him. A special literary interest attaches
to the interesting letters to Sir Toby Matthew on Instauratio
Magna, and to the Letter to the King upon the sending unto him
of a beginning of a History of His Majesties Time? .
In the reign of Charles I, few historical students will fail to
turn to the letters of the great statesman by whom the king's
councils were guided in the most critical period of his rule. The
Earl of Strafford's Letters and Despatches, extending over the
years 1611 to 1640, show forth a man who, though overwhelmed
by the 'violent hate' of a people refusing to be coerced into good
government, thoroughly knew his own mind and could forgive his
sovereign for not knowing his own? .
As we pass into the period of the civil war, our attention is
claimed, after the letters of Oliver Cromwell already noticed, by
The Fairfax Correspondence, and the Memorials of the Civil War
which forms the conclusion of the series. Unfortunately, these
volumes, which relate the history of a family genuinely English
in its temperament and bearing, and include correspondence with
many personages prominent in the struggle, are written in the
confusing form, popularised by Carlyle, of running narrative inter-
spersed with original letters. The same form is more successfully
adopted in one of the most attractive records of family history
belonging to the period from the outbreak of the civil war to the
revolution of 1688 (and beyond); but, in this instance, the design
is carried out with so much of both objectivity and freshness as
to leave little room for cavil.
The Letters and Papers of the Verney Family down to the
end of the year 1639 were first printed in 1833. They are docu-
ments of a family history which goes back to the reign of king
John, covers the wars of the Roses and the Tudor reigns, and
relates the story of the journey into Spain of Charles prince of
Wales, on whom Edward Verney attended. But the collection
ends with the Scottish expedition of king Charles, when his
standard-bearer, Sir Edmund Verney, was again in his train, in
1 Ibid. vol. 11.
2 These are in vol. Iv.
3 First published in 1739. See bibliography.


## p. 195 (#211) ############################################

The Verney Letters
195
1639. Here, the tale was taken up by pious hands and carried
on through three series of Memoirs of the Verney Family during
the civil war, during the commonwealth and from the restoration
to the year 1696. The story, like the stately and hospitable English
house which forms its centre, is full of portraits; but, in their book,
the tact of the editresses has allowed these to be mainly self-painted.
The Verneys, before and during the seventeenth century, were, in
the words of the elder lady Verney,
an ordinary gentleman's family of the higher class, mixing a good deal in the
politics of their times, with considerable country and local influence; Members
of Parliament, sheriffs, magistrates, soldiers--never place-men-marrying in
their own degree, with no splendid talents or positions to boast of, no crimes,
either noble or ignoble, to make them notorious, and, for that very reason,
good average specimens of hundreds of men or women of their age.
6
They were, at the same time, a family that cherished, in prosperity
and in adversity alike, the principles of conduct in both public and
private life to the observation of which the greatness and the
freedom of England are deeply indebted; and, in their case, the
principles in question were practised not less constantly by
the women than by the men. Sir Edmund Verney, ultimus
Angliae Bannerettus, who, with many misgivings as to the policy
of Charles I, had loyally adhered to his cause, fell at Edge-
hill, his right hand, with the royal standard in its grasp, being
severed from his arm; the responsibilities of the headship of the
family descended to his son Ralph and remained with him for
nearly half a century. While Sir Edmund was described as 'one
of the strictness of a Puritan, of the charity of a papist, of the
civility of an Englishman,' Sir Ralph is an admirable example of
the best class of country gentleman of his or any day, gentle and
courteous, the mainstay of his brothers and sisters and kinsmen
and kinswomen of every degree, a thorough man of business, sober
in his religious views, and, in his political, loyal to his convictions,
but with a self-reliant loyalty unintelligible either to courts or to
mobs. Though he had taken the side of the parliament during the
civil war, he went into exile rather than accept the covenant, and
remained there for several years—even after the sequestration
of bis estates had been removed, thanks to the self-sacrificing
exertions of his wife Mary, the heroine par excellence of the
Verney records—Mischief, as Sir Ralph fondly called her, and,
in person, another Henrietta Maria', though not in the benefits
1 There is a prima facie resemblance between the portraits of the two ladies, both
of whom were small in stature.
13_2


## p. 196 (#212) ############################################

196 Historical and Political Writings
which her services brought to her husband. After its chief had
quitted house and country, the remainder of the family seemed to
fall to pieces—the brave Sir Edmund Verney the younger, slain at
Drogheda ; Tom, the black sheep of the family, a most unfortunate
traveller' by land and sea, and the rest of them. But Sir Ralph
survived his beloved wife for nearly half a century, and, in the
days of Charles II and James II, again sat in parliament, and was
again found on the side of civil and religious liberty. The history
of the times, public as well as private, is spread out before us in
this family correspondence, as it had been in no previous collection
since the Paston letters. It may, perhaps, be added that the in-
fluence of literature or learning upon the Verney family is not
perceptibly important, though some of them had been partly
educated at Oxford. The education of ladies in the seventeenth
century was, undoubtedly, inferior to that of some of their Eliza-
bethan predecessors? ; their penmanship is execrable, and their
spelling purely phonetic.
The Correspondence of the Family of Hatton (1601–1704),
though it cannot compare in breadth of interest to the Verney
papers, is one of the most amusing of the collections dating from
this period; though what has been published only forms part of a
larger family correspondence”, and mainly dates from post-restora-
tion times. Lord chancellor Sir Christopher Hatton, of Elizabethan
fame, left a son and namesake who, after the restoration, became
governor of Jersey, and was succeeded in this office by his son,
afterwards first viscount Hatton, to whom most of the letters now
printed were addressed. Nothing can be more characteristic of
the ‘frank age' from which they date than these outspoken family
communings, of which the spelling, by no means the least of their
charms, has, happily, not been modernised by their editor.
For final mention among the letter-writers of this period it has
been thought well to reserve one who may, perhaps, be considered
as the most widely representative of them all, inasmuch as, while
himself not unaccustomed to the lower walks of diplomacy, it is
rather as an 'intelligencer' of long standing, and as a more or less
private letter-writer, that he established his claim to the place
1 This does not specially apply to Anne and Mary Fitton, passages from whose
letters have been published under the title Gossip from a Muniment Room (by lady
Newdigate-Newdegate, 1897), and carry us back to the years 1574—1618. Mary
played only too conspicuous a part at queen Elizabeth's court. Anne may be regarded
as one of the worthies of Warwickshire. Their letters contain more of the prose than
of the poetry of women's experience.
2 The MS Finch-Hatton Correspondence in the British Museum.


## p. 197 (#213) ############################################

James Howell
197
ology, he came tumbling into the world a grave Cadet, a true fees
which he holds in the history of English literature. At the same
time, his general literary activity was such that it would be neither
just nor convenient were not some general account of his literary
labours to be attempted in this place.
Although James Howell earned his appointment by Charles II
as historiographer royal of England by a long succession of publica-
tions to be classed as historical, his enduring title to literary fame
rests on his Familiar Letters (Epistolae Ho-Elianae), which can
only in part be described as historical writing. They occupy a
place of their own in the literature of essays and table-talk clothed
in the mainly fictitious form of personal letters. Before he began
his literary career, James Howell had led an active life, which had
extended over some forty-five years since, to use his own phrase-
',
Cosmopolite ; not born to Land, Lease, House or Office. ' He had
seen many cities and the dwellers therein beyond the limits of
England and his native Wales; he had been engaged in commercial
dealings in Venice and in diplomatic negotiations in Spain, besides
being temporarily employed in foreign service in Denmark and in
France; he had held an administrative post in York, and had thus
come to sit for a time in parliament; and he had been sent on a
confidential mission by Strafford from Dublin to Edinburgh and
London. In 1642, before he had actually begun to perform the
duties of clerk of the privy council, into which office he had been
sworn, he was imprisoned in the Fleet-because of his loyalty or
because of his debts, or for both reasons. During the eight or nine
years of his imprisonment, he lived the laborious life of a man
supporting himself by his pen, and produced a large proportion of
his numerous writings. In these, he at first kept up a display
of antagonism to presbyterianism, becoming, as a matter of course,
involved in controversy with Prynde; but this attitude he modified,
and, in 1651, he was released on bail. During the protectorate, he
sought to secure the goodwill of Cromwell, advocating a compromise
between him and the royal pretender. The restoration, naturally,
he welcomed ; but he obtained nothing from the crown beyond a
small gift of money (£200) and the office aforesaid. Some ironical
consolations addressed to him by disappointed cavaliers led to a
controversy between him and Sir Roger L'Estrange, who had not
much trouble in pointing out certain inconsistencies in Howell's
political profession. He died in 16661.
1 He was buried in the Temple church, where his monument is preserved, though
not on its original site.
>


## p. 198 (#214) ############################################

198
Historical and Political Writings
Such a life might well provide abundant materials for the
volume of Letters which Howell published from his prison in 1645,
and which was succeeded by a second volume in 1647, and a new
edition of both, with a third volume, in 1650. A fourth was added
in a collected edition which appeared in 1655. The reader will
not be long in discerning the fictitious character of many of these
letters. Even so outspoken a writer as he was would hardly have
.
cared actually to send to Buckingham, when at the height of his
power, the ‘few advertisements of the letter of advice (dated
13 February 1626/7), which I would not dare to present, had I not
hopes that the Goodness which is concomitant with your Greatness
would make them venial,' or have troubled Charles I, not long after
Marston moor, with variations on the consolatory fact that, in the
past, other kings had found themselves in an even worse plight.
There is further internal evidence to support the same conclusion,
besides the occasional great length of these letters, their sans gêne,
remarkable even in an age not habituated to reticence, their excess
of anecdotes (though often good in themselves, and always well
told) and of verse, with which an experienced man of the world
would scarcely have tired most of his correspondents. Moreover,
as a matter of fact, the few letters from Howell actually preserved
by those to whom they were sent,' are in a shorter and more
businesslike form.
Of the letters as we have them, some are lucid, as well as
readable, summaries of the political condition and historical de-
velopment of particular countries or communities—Venice, the
united provinces of the Netherlands, the Hanseatic league and
Spain (which he studied with particular curiosity); statements as
to the distribution of different religions on the earth, of the Jews
in Europe, and the like ; accounts of the inquisition, and of par-
ticular episodes of recent or contemporary history. Others are
practically nothing else than short essays—'middles,' as journalists
would call them on social or literary topics of divers kinds,
especially problems of language-for Howell was a scholar by
training as well as by instinct, and, in 1623, after some of his
travels were over, was elected a fellow of his college (Jesus) at
Oxford. His scientific interests appear to have been few, though
he could speculate on the changes in the human body, and,
in moral science, on the mysterious ways of Providence in its
dealing with man', and on demonology, for he was no exception
· Letter 4 in book iv (Jacobs's ed. ), there can be little doubt, is the original of
Parnell's famous tale of the hermit.


## p. 199 (#215) ############################################

Howell's Familiar Letters
199
6
to his generation in his belief in witchcraft. Occasionally, he
turns to more material topics—the potations of the chief nations of
the globe (from 'whisky' to 'cauphe') and the virtues of tobacco,
which even king James acknowledged in circumstances of stress?
All these matters, and a great many others, Howell discusses
in 'these rambling Letters,' 'which indeed,' he writes", "are
naught else than a Legend of the cumbersome Life and various
Fortunes of a Cadet'; and he deprecates the assurances of his
correspondent that
some of them are freighted with many excellent and quiet passages de
livered in a masculine and solid style, adorn'd with much eloquence and stuck
with the choicest flowers pick'd from the Muses garden.
But the praise was not, in all respects, undeserved. Howell com-
bined instruction and entertainment with admirable effect, and
possessed what was still the rare gift of imparting information
that was not only to a large extent new, but, also, true so far as
its purveyor could ascertain its truth. Accuracy of detail, in the
matter of dates and places, was not his fortes; on the other hand,
neither was a tendency to exaggeration, or a habit of garbling his
facts so as to suit his point of view, among his foibles. And,
above all, he said what he had to say clearly, often with not a
little force, and with a humour usually apposite and sound. His
anti-puritanism (as the later conduct of his life shows) was not
very violent, and sometimes takes a rather ingenious turn”; his
personal piety was quite unaffected, though his way of placing on
record his religious habits may savour rather too much of what he
calls 'striking a talley in the Exchequer of Heaven. ' And if, on
this and other occasions, he may seem to talk overmuch about
himself—'what subject,' as Thackeray asks in a passage where
James Howell is honoured by being coupled with Montaigneº +
'does a man know better? ' Thus, his letters as a whole, and
especially the earlier (for the later are not altogether exempt
from the decline noticeable in most continuations) do not fall far
short of his own description of 'Familiar Letters' as
the Keys of the Mind; they open all the Boxes of one's Breast, all the cells
of the Brain, and truly set forth the inward Man; nor can the Pencil so
lively represent the Face as the Pen can do the Fancy? .
i When he found himself in a pigsty.
From the Fleet, 5 May, book 11, letter 61.
3 Syracuse, now Messina' (book I, sect. 1, letter 27), is, perhaps, a rather out-of-
the-way instance of looseness.
* See the clever comparison (it hardly deserves a higher kind of comme
mendation)
between the advantages of prayer and those of praise (book ni, letter 67).
5 Book 1, sect. iv, letter 32.
• Roundabout Papers: On Two Children in Black.