the time of your travel, being, as I understand, come home freighted with observations and languages. Your father tells me, that he finds you are so wedded to the Italian and French, that you utterly neglect the Latin tongue; that is not well. I know you are so discreet in the course and method of your studies, that you will make the daughters to wait upon their mother, and love still your old friend. To truck the Latin for any other vulgar language is but an ill barter; it is as bad as that which Glaucus made with Diomedes, when he parted with his golden arms for brazen ones. The proceed of this exchange will come far short of any gentleman's expectation, though haply it may prove advantageous to a merchant, to whom common languages are more useful. I am big with desire to meet you, and to mingle a day's discourse with you, if not two; how you escaped the claws of the Inquisition, whereunto, I understand, you were like to fall; and of other traverses of your peregrination. Farewel, my precious Stone, and believe it, the least grain of those high respects you please to profess unto me is not lost, but answered with so many carrats. So I rest your most affectionate servitor.

LETTER LXX.

FROM THE SAME TO MR. R. K.

DEAR SIR,

Westminster, 15th August, 1636. You and I are upon a journey, though bound for several places, I for Hamburgh, you for your last home, as I understand by Dr. Baskerville, who

tells me, much to my grief, that this hectical disease will not suffer you to be long among us. I know, by some experiments which I have had of you, you have such a noble soul with 1 you, that will not be daunted by those natural apprehensions which death doth usually carry along with it among vulgar spirits. I do not think that you fear death as much now (though it be to some poßegv PoßegaTaToy), as you did to go into the dark when you were a child; you have had a fair time to prepare yourself. God give you a boon voyage to the haven you are bound for (which, I doubt not, will be heaven), and me the grace to follow, when I have passed the boisterous sea and swelling billows of this tumultuary life, wherein I have already shot divers dangerous gulfs, passed over some quicksands, rocks, and sundry ill-favoured reaches, while others sail in the sleeve of fortune. You and I have eaten a great deal of salt together, and spent much oil in the communication of our studies by literal correspondence, and otherwise, both in verse and prose.

And now, my dear friend, adieu, and live eternally in that world of endless bliss, where you shall have knowledge, as well as all things else, commensurate to your desires, where you shall clearly see the real causes and perfect truth of what we argue with that incertitude, and beat our brains about here below: yet though you be gone hence, you shall never die in the memory of your, &c.

LETTER LXXI.

JAMES HOWEL, ESQ. TO MR. R. HOWARD.

I

SIR, Fleet, 14th Feb. 1647. THERE is a saying that carrieth with it a great deal of caution: "From him whom I trust God defend me; for from him whom I trust not I will defend myself." There be sundry sorts of trusts, but that of a secret is one of the greatest: trusted T. P. with a weighty one, conjuring him that it should not take air and go abroad: which was not done according to the rules and religion of friendship, but it went out of him the very next day. Though the inconvenience may be mine; yet the reproach is his: nor would I exchange my damage for his disgrace. I would wish you take heed of him, for he is such as the comic poet speaks of," Plenus rimarum,” “ he is full of chinks, he can hold nothing :" you know a secret is too much for one, too little for three, and enough for two; but Tom must be none of those two, unless there were a trick to solder up his mouth: if he had committed a secret to me, and enjoined me silence, and I had promised it, though I had been shut up in Perillus' brazen bull, I should not have bellowed it out. I find it now true, "that he who discovers his secrets to another, sells him his liberty, and becomes his slave." Well, I shall be warier hereafter, and learn more wit. In the interim, the best satisfaction I can give myself is, to expunge him quite ex albo amicorum, to rase him

out of the catalogue of my friends (though I cannot of my acquaintance), where your name is inserted in great golden characters. I will endeavour to lose the memory of him, and that my thoughts may never run more upon the fashion of his face, which, you know, he hath no cause to brag of; I hate such blateroons:

Odi illos ceu claustra Erebi

I thought good to give you this little mot of advice, because the times are ticklish, of committing secrets to any, though not to your most affectionate friend to serve you.

SIR,

LETTER LXXII.

JAMES HOWEL, ESQ. TO SIR K. D.

At Rome.

Fleet, 3d March. 1646. THOUGH you know well, that in the carriage and course of my rambling life, I had occasion to be, as the Dutchman saith, a landloper, and to see much of the world abroad, yet methinks I have travelled more since I have been immured and martyred betwixt these walls than ever I did before; for I have travelled the Isle of Man, I mean this little world, which I have carried about me and within me so many years: for as the wisest of Pagan philosophers said that the greatest learning was the knowledge of one's self, to be his own geometrician; if one do so, he need not gad abroad

to see fashions, he shall find enough at home, he shall hourly meet with new fancies, new humours, new passions within doors.

This travelling over of one's-self is one of the paths that leads a man to paradise: it is true, that it is a dirty and dangerous one, for it is thick set with extravagant desires, irregular affections and concupiscences, which are but odd comrades, and oftentimes do lie in ambush to cut our throats: there are also some melancholy companions in the way, which are our thoughts, But they turn many times to be good fellows, and the best company; which makes me, that among these disconsolate walls I am never less alone than when I am alone; I am oft-times sole, but seldom solitary. Some there are, who are over-pestered with these companions, and have too much mind for their bodies; but I am none of those.

There have been (since you shook hands with England) many strange things happened here, which posterity must have a strong faith to believe; but, for my part, I wonder not at any thing, I have seen such monstrous things. You know there is nothing that can be casual; there is no success, good or bad, but is contingent to man sometime or other; nor are there any contingencies, present or future, but they have their parallels from time past: for the great wheel of fortune, upon whose rim (as the twelve signs upon the zodiac) all worldly chances are embossed, turns round perpetually; and the spokes of that wheel, which point at all human actions, return exactly to the same place after such a time of revolution; which makes me little marvel at any of the strange