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 stress1. 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 delivered 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 combined 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 forte; 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 Montaigne®— '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". 1 When he found himself in a pigsty. 2 From the Fleet, 5 May, book 11, letter 61. Syracuse, now Messina' (book 1, sect. 1, letter 27), is, perhaps, a rather out-ofthe-way instance of looseness. See the clever comparison (it hardly deserves a higher kind of commendation) between the advantages of prayer and those of praise (book II, letter 67). 5 Book 1, sect. iv, letter 32. • Roundabout Papers: On Two Children in Black. 7 Book II, letter 70. James Howell's literary activity was very far from being exhausted by his letters; during the years from 1642 to 1651, his pen was never at rest, and the habit, once acquired, was never relinquished. But, in one way or another, most of his lesser productions seem more or less supplementary to the work on which his literary reputation rests. An apparent exception is Dendrologia, Dodona's Grove, or the Vocall Forest (1640), the earliest of his publications, which may be described as an allegorical gallery of characters conveying, under the thin veil of the names of trees or of designations derived from them, the political sympathies or antipathies of the writer1. An allegory of this sort admitted of easy multiplication, and Howell appended to it a series of skeleton pleas, similar in design, for the monarchical form of government2. A second appendix, England's Teares for the present Warres, is a rhetorical lament by London's mother, England3. In a different vein-one of rough satirical humour-are two curious pieces of Howell's later years, which, as it were, travesty the sober summaries exemplified in his letters-A Brief Character of the Low Countries under the States (1660) and A Perfect Description of the Country of Scotland (1659). The satire against the Dutch is at least accompanied by a recognition of some of their merits; but the anti-Scottish tract descends into invective so bitter and so coarse that its date alone can excuse it; the unerring instinct of Wilkes, more than a century later, selected it for reproduction, with a sly preamble, in No. 31 of The North Briton (August 1762). In his capacity as a traveller, Howell, though familiar only with western, and parts of southern and central, Europe, promulgated Instructions for Forreine Travell (1642, republished 1650, with a ''Cedar' is the emperor; 'Oke, Vine, Beech' are the kings of England, France, Sweden and Poland; 'Elder' is duke Maximilian I of Bavaria ('so-called both from his age and the ill favour he hath amongst us'); Elmes,' the nobility; 'Ampeluna,' France; Adriana,' Venice; 'Alchorana,' Turkey; 'Druina,' England; 'Boetis,' the university of Oxford, etc. That the opinions suggested by the allegory are not altogether conventional is shown by the character of Elaiana' (Spain, the land of oil), which displays discriminating insight. • The Great Conjunction or Parliament of Stars; Ornilogia (sic), or The Great Consult of Birds; Anthologia, or Parliament of Flowers; The Assembly of Architects (on the value of such a pillar as an ancient court of justice); The Insurrection of the Winds (against rebellion). It ends with the expression of a desire that, if England and her Monarch miscarry, her Epitaph may be written by her dearly beloved Childe, James Howell.' There are spiders as bigge as Shrimps, and I think as many'—' You may sooner convert a Jew, than make an ordinary Dutch-man yeild to Arguments that Crosse him.' If the Almighty came down from heaven in the last day with His Angels in their whitest garments, the Scots would run away, crying, The Children of the Chappel are come again to torment us, let us flie from the abomination of these boys.' new appendix 'for Travelling into Turkey and the Levant parts,' which, unlike Fynes Moryson and Coryate, he had himself never visited1). The little book is a very diverting, but, at the same time, very rational anticipation of the introductions to guidebooks of later days, containing, as it does, much valuable historical, political and (allowing for the philological shortcomings of the age) linguistic observation interspersed with interesting observations on men and manners. It could, however, hardly be that he should not be most at home in London, where, by his own choice, or lodged by the parliament, he spent a large portion of his life; and his Londinopolis; An Historical Discourse or Perlustration of the City of London (1657), a careful guidebook of London, with a survey of its several wards, and special mention of its lawcourts, is among the last literary fruits of his life, bearing the characteristic motto Senesco, non segnesco. It makes no pretence of being wholly original; and, indeed, the author confesses that, in this instance, he has followed the examples of 'the Lord Bacon's Henry the Seventh, and my Lord Herbert's Henry the eighth,' of which the noble authors, though the composition, and digesting be theirs, whereby they determined their Books, yet, under favour, touching the main ingredients... took them from others, who had written the life of these Kings before. Yet the work is far from deficient in vigour, and includes a 'Parallel with other great Cities,' showing in which of twenty several points they are respectively inferior to London. 1 Of Coryate and his Crudities (1610), as well as of other English travellers, something has been said ante, vol. Iv, pp. 89 ff. Midway between Coryate's over-advertised, but, as a matter of fact, unjustly decried, book and James Howell's Instructions, there appeared so much as up to a recent date was allowed to become publicly known of Fynes Moryson's Travels. The first three parts of his Itinerary were published in 1617; but part IV, with an imprimatur dated 1626, remained, unprinted, at Corpus Christi college, Oxford, till the more important portions of it were published, thanks to the energy of Charles Hughes, in 1903. The whole work was originally written in Latin, in which form it is preserved among the Harleian MSS in the British Museum. The English version is also by Fynes Moryson. On the whole, he was an impartial, as well as a candid, observer, whose eyes were open to national vices, such as Italian immorality and German intemperance. Though by no means infallible in his statements of fact, he is not habitually inaccurate. He writes in good Elizabethan prose, but without any effort at displaying his scholarship after the fashion of James Howell. CHAPTER IX HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL WRITINGS II HISTORIES AND MEMOIRS IN the present chapter, which has to deal with a number of more or less conscious endeavours to put the results of historical study or of personal experience into a literary shape, it seems well to begin with a notice of some of the works produced in the period under discussion which aimed at being 'perfect history' or history proper. Whether the masterpiece of the historical works of the age, Clarendon's Rebellion, viewed in connection with his autobiography-from which (as will be seen) there is no possibility of detaching it-be regarded as history proper, or as partaking of the character of memoirs, it must mark the height of our survey of the histories of the age, and will, at the same time, serve as a transition from these to the accumulation of memoirs, diaries, contemporary biographies and autobiographies, and personal narratives of various sorts from which some selection will be attempted. What has to be said of political literature, for the most part, will be added as occasion may arise, for it would not be feasible to spread the net widely over the sea of unnumbered pamphlets of an age in which every subject in church and state was regarded as contentious, and few were left undiscussed in 'fundamental' argument and with a vast expenditure of printer's ink. The days of the later Tudor annalists and chroniclers, thoroughly national in their spirit and sympathies, had not passed away when upon some few far-seeing minds had dawned the conception of historical writing which, while still furnishing a full account of the events of the past should, at the same time, interest the political thinker and satisfy the demands of literary art. Bacon's Historie of the Reigne of King Henry the Seventh (1622), which may practically be regarded as the earliest of English historical monographs, was actually composed in 1621, probably after Bacon, on his release from the Tower, had returned to Gorhambury. In the circumstances, as Spedding points out1, the book could not be written otherwise than at secondhand; for, during all but the last six weeks of the four or five months within which the task was executed, the author was excluded from London and from the house of Sir Robert Cotton, who supplied him with some of his material. It is, consequently, in the main, founded on Bernard André and Polydore Vergil, with Fabyan and the later chroniclers, and a few additions by Stow, and, more especially, by Speed, some of whose mistakes were copied by Bacon. Yet this Life was by no means a piece of mere compilation, either in design or execution. The conception of the character of Henry VII dates from an early period of Bacon's career, as is proved by a fragment of a history of the Tudor reigns from Henry VIII to Elizabeth, discovered by Spedding 2; which also seems to refute Mackintosh's idea that the Historie of the Reigne of King Henry the Seventh was written, not only (as, in a sense, it certainly was) to justify James I, but, also, to flatter him by representing Henry VII as a model king and the prototype of the reigning monarch. For the rest, if features are observable in Bacon's king Henry which seem to support Mackintosh's view (thus, Henry was 'careful to obtain good intelligence from abroad'), there are others in which the resemblance is most imperfect ('for his pleasures, there is no news of them'; 'he was governed by none') --though it might be possible to see in this very unlikeness the most subtle flattery. There is certainly no flattery to be found in some touches of unmistakable irony-in the reference to Henry's great attention to religious foundations as he became old, or in the turn given to the application of the phrase 'his Salomon of England (for Salomon also was too heavy upon his people in exactions).' On the whole, Henry VII, in the mirror of Bacon's narrative, appears, not as a man of genius, but as a wise and singularly ready politician, and as one of whom it might be said that 'what he minded he compassed.' It need hardly be added that the spirit of the book is thoroughly monarchical; the writer's contempt for 'the rude people,' always intent upon being deceived, is especially noticeable in the narrative of the attempts of Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck. The style of this work possesses a kind of charm absent from few of Bacon's writings, which always have the 1 Bacon's Literary and Professional Works, vol. 1 (vi), pp. 23 ff. |