know your reputation is precious to you, as it should be to every noble mind; you have exposed it now to the hazard, therefore you must be careful it receive no taint at your return, by not answering that expectation which your prince and noble parents have of you. You are now under the chiefest clime of wisdom, fair Italy, the darling of nature, the nurse of policy, the theatre of virtue; but though Italy give milk to virtue with one dug, she often suffers vice to suck at the other; therefore you must take heed you mistake not the dug; for there is an ill-favoured saying, that Inglese Italionato è diavolo incarnato; an Englishman Italianate is a devil incarnate. I fear no such thing of you, I have had such pregnant proofs of your ingenuity, and noble inclinations to virtue and honour: I know you have a mind to both, but I must tell you, that you will hardly get the goodwill of the latter, unless the first speak a good word for you. When you go to Rome you may haply see the ruins of two temples, one dedicated to Virtue, the other to Honour; and there was no way to enter into the last but through the first. Noble sir, I wish your good very seriously, and if you please to call to memory, and examine the circumstance of things, and my carriage towards you since I had the happiness to be known first to your honourable family, I know you will conclude that I love and honour you in no vulgar

way.

My lord, your grandfather, was complaining lately that he had not heard from you a good while by the next shipping to Leghorn, among other things he intends to send you a whole brawn

in collars. I pray be pleased to remember my affectionate service to Mr. Thomas Savage, and my kind respects to Mr. Bold. For English news, I know this packet comes freighted to you, therefore I forbear at this time to send any. Farewel, noble heir of honour, and command always your true servitor.

LETTER LVI.

JAMES HOWEL, ESQ. TO DR. PRICHARD.

London, 6th Jan. 1625.

SIR, SINCE I was beholden to you for your many favours in Oxford, I have not heard from you (ne gry quiden); I pray let the wonted correspondence be now revived, and receive new vigour between us.

My lord chancellor Bacon is lately dead of a long languishing weakness; he died so poor that he scarce left money to bury him, which, though he had a great wit, did argue no great wisdom: it being one of the essential properties of a wise man to provide for the main chance. I have read, that it had been the fortunes of all poets commonly to die beggars; but for an orator, a lawyer, and philosopher, as he was, to die so, it is rare. It seems the same fate befel him, that attended Demosthenes, Seneca, and Cicero (all great men), of whom the two first fell by corruption. The fairest diamond may have a flaw in it, but I believe he died poor out of a contempt of the pelf of fortune, as also out of an excess of generosity;

which appeared, as in divers other passages, so once, when the king had sent him a stag, he sent up for the under-keeper, and having drank the king's health to him in a great silver gift bowl, he gave it for his fee.

He wrote a pitiful letter to king James, not long before his death, and concludes, "Help me, dear sovereign, lord and master, and pity me so far, that I, who have been born to a bag, be not now, in my age, forced in effect to bear a wallet; nor that I, who desire to live to study, may be driven to study to live." Which words, in my opinion, argued a little abjection of spirit, as his former letter to the prince did of profaneness; wherein he hoped, that as the father was his crea tor, the son will be his redeemer. I write not this to derogate from the noble worth of the lord vis count Verulam, who was a rare man; a man recondita scientiæ, et ad salutem literarum natus, and I think the eloquentest that was born in this isle. They say he shall be the last lord chancellor, as sir Edward Coke was the last lord chief justice of England; for ever since they have been termed lord chief justices of the king's bench; so hereafter they shall be only keepers of the great seal, which for title and office are disposeable; but they say the lord chancellor's title is indelible.

I was lately at Gray's-Inn, with sir Eubule, and he desired me to remember him to you, as I do also salute Meum Prichardum ex imis præ cordiis, Vale κεφαλή μοι προσφιλεςάτη. Yours affectionately.

SIR,

LETTER LVII.

JAMES HOWEL, ESQ. TO SIR J. S.

At Leeds Castle.

Westminster, 25 July, 1625.

Ir was a quaint difference the ancients did put betwixt 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, similies, 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 is 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 falter 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 homi

lies; 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, listed 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 sleazy 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 profane hyperboles, and larded upand-down with such gross flatteries, with others besides, which he sends as urinals up-and-down