226

THE AUTHOR LANGUISHING IN PENURY.

as idolatrous observances at such seasons, though goodly to partake of at other times; to such, Hudibras must have been a welcome guest; and, whilst its forgotten author was languishing in indigence, his verse resounded in the court or hall-in many a courtly gallery and palace.

CHAPTER XI.

THE LETTER WRITERS AND DIARY WRITERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

PEPYS; HIS BIRTH AND EDUCATION. - HIS DIARY FOUND

THE SCENES AND CHARACTERS INTRODUCED BY HIM.

SIR JOHN SUCKLING.
HIS FUNERAL.

SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT; PEPYS' ACCOUNT OF DAVENANT'S POEM ON THE DEATH OF SHAKESPEARE.SCENIC DECORATION DUE TO HIM.

SIR JOHN AND LADY DENHAM.-DEATH

JAMES HOWELL'S LETTERS.

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CHAPTER XI.

THE familiar letters of James Howell, he tells us, are a 'legend of his life;' and that life was as eventful, as unscrupulous in action, and as chequered in fortune, as most of those which, commencing in the reign of James the First, extended to the pleasant days of the Restoration.

'A letter and an oration,' Howell, in the very first of his well-known Epistles, declares, should differ, as the ancients say, in this particular: 'the one should be attired as a woman the other as a man. The oration is allowed long side-robes, such as periods, parentheses, similies, examples, and rhetorical flourishes; but a letter should be short-coated and closely conched.' He abhors 'Latin epistolizers, with their mere Bartholomew wares, twisted into pedantic shreds of schoolboy verses;' he cannot away with such sleazy stuff, such cobweb compositions as those of the French letter-writers; and to attempt to draw any observation out of them,' would be, he declares, like 'trying to distil cream out of froth:' and of them it may, he thinks, be said, as of the Echo, 'that she is a mere sound and nothing else.'

The 'Familiar Letters' were begun in 1625; and were dedicated, in the approved fulsome style, to Charles the First. We shall see how Howell stood the ordeal of the Interregnum before we venture to repeat his words of duty and devotedness to that ill-fated monarch.

James Howell was the son of a Welsh clergyman; a sort of

230

HOWELL AT JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD.

patent of perpetual poverty is contained in these words. His father was Minister of Abernant, in Carmarthenshire; and James, the youngest of a numerous tribe, after being prepared under a learned but lashing master, at the Free School at Hereford, proceeded, probably with a tribe of Howells, Evans's, and Williams's, to Jesus College, Oxford. Born in 1596, he was only seventeen years of age when, in 1613, he became a Bachelor of Arts. But although the young Bachelor had ́ a good appetite for learning,' he, whilst his elder brother, Thomas, was gaining all sorts of academic honours, preferred to try his fortune in London. Many of our nobility were then concerned in the manufacture of glass; it was quite a calling, appropriate to the great in those days. In Venice, all the makers of glass were gentlemen; in France, a decree was passed that, not only should the making of glass not derogate from a man's nobility, as other mercantile callings did, but that none but nobles should be competent to manufacture the article. So glass-making was an exclusive privilege: there is no accounting for matters of gentility in this world. Brewing, for instance, is in England at the present day an aristocratic investment of money; whereas, if a man sells malt or hops, the materials, or the supposed materials, of 'Hanbury's Entire,' or 'Barclay's Entire,' he is a mere trader, and no gentleman. There is no reasoning to be adopted on the point: our lords, therefore, and their ladies of the seventeenth century, sneered at a manufacturer of broadcloth, but welcomed the maker of perishable glass to their tables: and the great Earl of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlain, was, with Sir Robert Mansel, one of the firm of which James Howell was manager.

In

Pembroke, Mansel and Co. were capital tradesmen. order to avoid the expense of fuel, they soon obtained a monopoly of making all sorts of glass with pit coal; and Howell was sent abroad to hire clever workmen: Venice, of course, was one of the chief points of this embassy,—and, at