Isaac Walton to John Aubrey.

For your friends' quæ.

this:

Dec. 2, 1680.

I only knew Ben Jonson, but my Lord of Winton knew him very well, and says he was in the 6th, that is the uppermost form in Westminster School, at which time his father died, and his mother married a bricklayer, who made him (much against his will) to help him in his trade. But in a short time his schoolmaster, Mr. Camden, got him in better employment, which was to attend or accompany a son of Sir Walter Runleyes in his travels. Within a short time after their return, they parted (I think not in cold blood) and with a love suitable to what they had in their travels (not to be commended); and then Ben began to set up for himself in the trade by which he got his subsistence and fame, of which I need not give any account. He got in time to have a £100 a year from the King, also a pension from the city, and the like from many of the nobility, and some of the gentry, which was well paid for love or fear of his railing in verse or prose or both.

My Lord of Winton told me, he told him he was (in his long retirement and sickness, when he saw him, which was often) much afflicted that he had profaned the Scripture in his plays, and lamented it with horror; yet at that time of his long retirement, his pensions (so much as came in) were given to a woman that governed him, with whom he lived and died near the Abbey at Westminster; and that neither he nor she took much care for next week, and would be sure not to want wine, of which he usually took too much before he went to bed, if not oftener and sooner. My Lord tells me, he knows not, but thinks he was born in Westminster. The question may be put to Mr. Wood very easily upon what grounds he is positive as to his being born there? he is a friendly man and will resolve it. So much for brave Ben.

For your 2nd and 3rd quæ. of Mr. Hill and Billingsley, I do neither know nor can learn anything worth telling you. For your remaining quæ. of Mr. Warner and Mr. Hariott, this :-Mr. Warner did long and constantly lodge near the water stairs or market in Woolstable (Woolstable is a place or lane not far from Charing Cross, and nearer to Northumberland House). My Lord of Win

chester tells me he knew him, and that he said he first found out the circulation of the blood, and discovered it to Dr. Harvey (who said that 'twas he himself that found it) for which he is so memorably famous. Warner had a pension of £40 from the Earl of Northumberland that lay so long a prisoner in the Tower, and some allowance from Sir Thomas Alesbury with whom he usually spent his summer in Windsor Park.

Mr. Hariott my Lord tells me knew also, that he was a more gentle man than Warner. That he had £120 a year pension from the said Earl and his lodging in Sion House where he believes he died.

This is all I know or can learn for your friend, which I wish may be worth the time and trouble of reading it.

I. W.

LIV.

The tedium of Sir John Eliot's imprisonment in the Tower from 1630 to 1632 was relieved by the gifts and correspondence of his friends; among these the most assiduous was the great champion of English liberty, John Hampden. The present letter contains Hampden's impression of the Monarchy of Man,' a philosophical treatise written by Eliot during his last imprisonment.

John Hampden to Sir John Eliot.

Hampden: June 29, 1631. Sir,-You shall receive the book I promised by this bearer's immediate hand; for the other papers I presume to take a little, but a little, respite. I have looked upon your rare piece only with a superficial view, as at first sight to take the aspect and proportion in the whole; after, with a more accurate eye, to take out the lineaments of every part. 'Twere rashness in me, therefore, to discover any judgment, before I have ground to make one. This I discern, that 'tis as complete an image of the pattern as can be drawn by lines, a lively character of a large mind; the subject, method and expressions, excellent and homogenial, and to say truth, sweet heart, somewhat exceeding my commendations. My words cannot render them to the life, yet, to show my ingenuity rather than my wit, would not a less model have given a full representation of that subject? not by diminution, but by contraction, of parts? I desire to learn; I dare not say. The varia

tions upon each particular seem many; all, I confess, excellent. The fountain was full, the chanell narrow; that may be the cause. Or that the author imitated Virgil, who made more verses by many than he intended to write, to extract a just number. Had I seen all this, I could easily have bid him make fewer; but if he had bid me tell which he should have spared, I had been apposed. So say I of these expressions, and that to satisfy you, not myself; but that by obeying you in a command so contrary to my own disposition, you may measure how large a power you have

over

Jo. HAMPDEN.

Recommend my service to Mr. Long, and if Sir O. Luke bo in town, express my affection to him in these words. The first part of your papers you had by the hands of B. Valentine long since. If you hear of your sons, or can send to them, let me know.

LV.

James Howel was the author of upwards of forty_miscellaneous works, but is now chiefly remembered by his Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ,' or familiar letters, first printed in 1645. He may be called the Father of Epistolary Literature, the first writer, that is to say, of letters which, addressed to individuals, were intended for publication. A style animated, racy, and picturesque; keen powers of observation; great literary skill; an eager, restless, curious spirit; some humour and much wit; and a catholicity of sympathy very unusual with the writers of his age-are his chief claims to distinction.

If the following remarks of Howel on the composition of a letter were supplemented by the observations of his friend Ben Jonson on the same subject, we should be furnished with a terse and complete art of letter-writing. Honest Howel's complaints about the letters of his own day scarcely lose their significance when applied to the letters of ours.

James Howel to Sir J. S- at Leeds Castle.

Westminster: July 25, 1625.

Sir, It was a quaint difference the ancients did put betwix a letter and an oration; that the one should be attired like a woman, the other like a man: the latter of the two is allowed large side robes, as long periods, parentheses, similes, examples, and other parts of rhetorical flourishes; but a letter or epistle

should be short-coated and closely couched; a hungerlin becomes a letter more handsomely than a gown; indeed we should write as we speak; and that's a true familiar letter which expresseth one's mind, as if he were discoursing with the party to whom he writes, in succinct and short terms. The tongue and the pen are both of them interpreters of the mind; but I hold the pen to be the more faithful of the two. The tongue in udo posita, being seated in a moist slippery place, may fail and faulter in her sudden extemporal expressions; but the pen having a greater advantage of premeditation, is not so subject to error, and leaves things behind it upon firm and authentic record. Now letters, though they be capable of any subject, yet commonly they are either narratory, objurgatory, consolatory, monitory, or congratulatory. The first consists of relations, the second of reprehensions, the third of comfort, the two last of counsel and joy: there are some who in lieu of letters write homilies; they preach when they should epistolize: there are others that turn them to tedious tractates this is to make letters degenerate from their true nature. Some modern authors there are who have exposed their letters to the world, but most of them, I mean among your Latin epistolizers, go freighted with mere Bartholomew ware, with trite and trivial phrases only, lifted with pedantic shreds of school-boy verses. Others there are among our next transmarine neighbours eastward, who write in their own language, but their style is so soft and easy, that their letters may be said to be like bodies of loose flesh without sinews, they have neither joints of art nor arteries in them; they have a kind of simpering and lank hectic expressions made up of a bombast of words and finical affected compliments only. I cannot well away with such fleazy stuff, with such cobweb-compositions, where there is no strength of matter, nothing for the reader to carry away with him that may enlarge the notions of his soul. One shall hardly find an apophthegm, example, simile, or any thing of philosophy, history, or solid knowledge, or as much as one new created phrase in a hundred of them; and to draw any observations out of them, were as if one went about to distil cream out of froth; insomuch that it may be said of them, what was said of the Echo, 'that she is a mere sound and nothing else.'

I return you your Balzac by this bearer: and when I found

those letters wherein he is so familiar with his King, so flat; and those to Richlieu so puffed with prophane hyperboles, and larded up and down with such gross flatteries, I forbore him further. So I am your most affectionate servitor.

LVI.

This letter is interesting as being a contemporary account of the death of James I., and of the accession of Charles I. The suspicion that the King was poisoned by the instrumentality of Buckingham, though very improbable, has been suggested by other writers besides Howel.

James Howel to his Father.

London: Dec. 11, 1625.

Sir, I received yours of the 3rd February by the hands of my cousin Thomas Guin of Trecastle.

It was my fortune to be on Sunday was fortnight at Theobalds, where his late Majesty King James departed this life, and went to his last rest upon the day of rest, presently after Sermon was done: A little before the break of day, he sent for the Prince, who rose out of his bed, and came in his night-gown; the King seem'd to have some earnest thing to say unto him, and so endeavour'd to rouse himself upon his Pillow, but his Spirits were so spent that he had not strength to make his words audible. He died of a fever which began with an Ague, and some Scotch Doctors mutter at a plaster the Countess of Buckingham applied at the outside of his stomach: 'Tis thought the last breach of the match with Spain, which for many years he had so vehemently desir'd, took too deep an impression in him, and that he was forc'd to rush into a War, now in his declining age, having liv'd in a continual uninterrupted peace his whole life, except some collateral aids he had sent his Son-in-law. As soon as he expir'd, the Privy Council sat, and in less than a quarter of an hour, King Charles was proclaim'd at Theobalds Court-gate, by Sir Edward Zouch Knight Marshal, Master Secretary Conway dictating unto him, that whereas it had pleas'd God to take to his mercy our most gracious Sovereign King James of famous memory, we proclaim Prince Charles his rightful and indubitable Heir to be King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, &c. The Knight Mar