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convenience. So I wish you your heart's desire here and Heaven hereafter, because I am,

Lond. 25 July, 1635.

In no vulgar way of friendship,

J. H."

Amongst the various personages incidentally introduced to our acquaintance, is Ben Jonson, of whom there are occasional notices, which only make us wish for more. Howell seems to have been upon terms of great intimacy with the venerable laureate, whom he addresses as his "Honoured friend and father."

A supper scene is thus described in a letter to Sir Thomas Hawk.

"I was invited yesternight to a solemn supper by B. J., where you were deeply remembered; there was good company, excellent cheer, choice wines, and jovial welcome: one thing intervened which almost spoiled the relish of the rest, that B. began to engross all the discourse, to vapour extremely of himself, and by vilifying others to magnify his own muse. T. Ca: buzzed me in the ear, that though Ben had barrelled up a great deal of knowledge, yet it seems he had not read the ethics, which, among other precepts of morality, forbid self commendation, declaring it to be an ill-favored solecism in good manners. For my part I am content to dispense with this Roman infirmity of B., now that time hath snowed upon his pericranium. You know Ovid and Horace were subject to this humour; the one bursting out into

Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira, nec ignis, &c.

The other into

Exegi monumentum ære perennius."

Ben Jonson, it seems, had written a severe satire upon Inigo Jones, which had given offence at court, upon which occasion Howell thus writes to him.

"Father Ben,

The fangs of a bear and the tusks of a wild boar do not bite worse and make deeper gashes than a goose quill sometimes; no, not the badger himself, who is said to be so tenacious of his bite, that he will not give over his hold till he feels his teeth meet and the bone crack. Your quill hath proved so to Mr. Jones; but the pen, with which you have so gashed him, it seems, was made rather of a porcupine than a goose-quill, it is so keen and firm. You know

—Anser, apis, vitulus, populos et regna gubernant—

The goose, the bee, and the calf, (meaning wax, parchment, and pen,) rule the world; but of the three, the pen is the most predominant. I know you have a commanding one, but you must not let it tyrranise in

that manner as you have done lately. Some give out there was a hair in it, or that your ink was too thick with gall, else it would not have so bespattered and shaken the reputation of a royal architect; for reputation, you know, is like a fair structure, long time a rearing, but quickly ruined. If your spirit will not let you retract, you shall do well to repress any more copies of the satire; for, to deal plainly with you, you have lost some ground at court by it, and, as I hear from a good hand, the king, who hath so great a judgement in poetry, (as in all other things else) is not well pleased therewith.

Dispense with this freedom of

Westminster, July, 1635.

Your respectful Son and Servitor,

J. H."

It does not appear that Howell took any decided part in the political divisions of the time. He was elected to serve in parliament, for the borough of Richmond, in the year 1627; but though his connections led him to lean to the side of the King, and though he served under Strafford in Ireland, and was, after Strafford's death, appointed Clerk of the Council, it does not appear that he was at all an ultra royalist. In 1643 he writes, "I was lately come to London upon some occasions of my own, and I had been divers times in Westminster Hall, when I conversed with many parliament men of my acquaintance; but one morning betimes there rushed into my chamber five men, armed with swords, pistols, and bills, and told me, they had a warrant from the parliament for me: I desired to see their warrant, they denied it: I desired to see the date of it, they denied it: I desired to see my name in the warrant, they denied all. At last one of them pulled a greasy paper out of his pocket and shewed me three or four names subscribed and no more.' He was carried to the Fleet, where he remained till after the King's death; and it was here that he was obliged to have recourse to his pen as a means of support, and in the course of a few years he wrote and translated a variety of works. He does not seem to have much liked the latter of these occupations.

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"I must confess my genius hath often prompted me that I never was cut out for a translator, there being a kind of servility therein: for it must needs be somewhat tedious to one that hath any free born thoughts within him, and genuine conceptions, of his own, (whereof I have some, though shallow ones) to enchain himself to a verbal servitude, and the sense of another. Moreover, translations are but as turncoated things at best, especially among languages that have advantages one of the other, as the Italian hath of the English, which may be said to differ one from the other as silk doth from cloth; the common wear of both countries where they are spoken. And as cloth is the more substantial, so the English tongue, by reason 'tis so knotted

with consonants, is the stronger and more sinewy of the two. But silk is more smooth and slick, and so is the Italian tongue compared to the English: or, I may say, translations are like the wrong side of a Turkey carpet, which useth to be full of thrums and knots, and nothing so even as the right side: or, one may say, (as I spake elsewhere) that translations are like wines taken off the lees and poured into other vessels, that must lose somewhat of their first strength and briskness, which, in the pouring, or passage rather, evaporates into air.

Moreover, touching transactions, it is to be observed, that every language hath certain idioms, proverbs, and peculiar expressions of its own, which are not rendible any other way but paraphrastically; therefore he overacts the office of an interpreter who doth enslave himself too strictly to words and phrases. I have heard of an excess among limners, called too much of the life, which happens when one aims at similitude more than skill: so in version of languages, one may be so overpunctual in words that he may mar the matter."

Though Howell was not an ultra royalist, yet he was too much a man of sense not to be disgusted with the outrageous pitch of extravagance to which the opposite party carried their principles.

"Who would have thought poor England had been brought to this pass ? Could it ever have entered into the imagination of man, that the scheme and whole frame of so ancient and well moulded a government should be so suddenly struck off the hinges, quite out of joint, and tumbled into such horrid confusion? Who would have held it possible, that to fly from Babylon we should fall into such a Babel? That to avoid superstition some people should be brought to belch out such a horrid profaneness, as to call the temples of God the tabernacles of Satan; the Lord's supper a twopenny ordinary; to make the communion-table a manger, and the font a trough to water their horses in; to term the white decent robe of the presbyter the whore's smock; the pipes through which nothing came but anthems and holy hymns the devil's bagpipes; the Liturgy of the church, though extracted most of it out of the sacred text, called by some another kind of Alcoran, by others raw porridge, by some, a piece forged in hell? Who would have thought to have seen in England the churches shut and the shops open on Christmas day? Who would have dreamt ten years since, when Archbishop Laud did ride in state through London street, accompanying my Lord of London to be sworn Lord High Treasurer of England, that the mitre should have now come to such a scorn, to such a national kind of hatred, as to put the whole island into a combustion? Which makes me call to memory a saying of the Earl of Kildare, in Ireland, in the reign of Henry the Eighth; which earl, having a deadly feud with the Bishop of Cassilis, burnt a church belonging to that diocese; and being asked, upon his examination before the Lord Deputy, at the Castle of Dublin, why he had committed such a horrid sacrilege as to burn God's church, he answered, I had never burnt the church, unless I had thought the bishop had been in't.

Lastly, who would have imagined that the Excise would have taken footing here? A word, I remember, in the last parliament save one, so odious, that when Sir D. Carleton, then Secretary of State, did but name it in the House of Commons, he was like to be sent to the Tower; although he named it to no ill sense, but to shew what advantage of happiness the people of England had over other nations, having neither the Gabels of Italy, the Tailles of France, or the Excise of Holland laid upon them; yet upon this he was suddenly interrupted and called to the bar. Such a strange metamorphosis poor England is now come to; and, I am afraid, our miseries are not come to their height, but the longest shadows stay till the evening."

There is a mixture of levity in the conclusion of his account of the king's execution, which accords ill with the serious tone of the commencement, and which it is difficult to reconcile with the feelings of grief and horror, with which one must suppose every friend of the unfortunate monarch to have been overwhelmed.

"That black tragedy which was lately acted here, as it has filled most hearts among us with consternation and horror, so, I believe, it hath been no less resented abroad. For my own particular, the more I ruminate upon it, the more it astonisheth my imagination, and shaketh all the cells of my brain; so that, sometimes, I struggle with my faith, and have much ado to believe it yet. I shall give over wondering hereafter, nothing shall seem strange to me; only I will attend with patience how England will thrive, now that she is let blood in the Basilical vein, and cured, as they say, of the King's-Evil.”

He seems to have borne his imprisonment with patience and even cheerfulness, and there is throughout a tone of pious, resignation, which impresses the reader with the most favorable opinion of his disposition and character.

"You know better than I, that all events, good or bad, come from the all-disposing high Deity of Heaven: if good, he produceth them; if bad, he permits them. He is the pilot that sits at the stern, and steers the great vessel of the world, and we must not presume to direct him in his course, for he understands the use of the compass better than He commands also the winds and the weather, and after a storm he never fails to send us a calm, and to recompense ill times with better, if we can live to see them, which I pray you may do, whatever becomes of

we.

Your still most faithful

Humble Servitor,

J. H.".

But it is time to conclude. We have given a sufficient sample of this entertaining book to shew the quality of its con

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tents, which will well repay the trouble of a more comprehensive perusal. It is refreshing to turn from the cobweb compositions of the present day, in which there is no strength of matter, to the sterling sense and lively wit of these Familiar Letters, which, as the author himself says, are" the keys of the mind, opening all the boxes of the breast, all the cells of the brain, and truly setting forth the inward man; nor can the pencil so lively represent the face, as the pen can do the fancy."

Nor is it entertainment alone, as we have endeavoured to shew, that we shall derive from the pages of Howell. There are few books better entitled to take utile dulci for their motto, for, as a companion and commentary upon the regular history of the time, the volume is invaluable. We will close our remarks by quoting the concluding sentence of the author's Epistle Dedicatory to Charles the First, the position contained in which is abundantly illustrated in his own work.

"Nor would these Letters be so Familiar as to presume upon so high a patronage, were not many of them records of your own royal actions. And 'tis well known, that letters can treasure up and transmit matters of state to posterity with as much faith, and be as authentic registers and safe repositaries of truth, as any story whatsoever."

ART. II.-The Sháh-Námeh of Ferdusi, a Heroic Poem on the History of Persia, from the earliest times, to the conquest of that Kingdom by the Arabs. PERSIAN MS.

We have promised our readers to present them from time to time with notices of works, which from different causes have never been printed, but are lying in public or private collections unseen and unheard of by the world. From these we of course mean to select such only, as are interesting from their matter, as well as their rarity; for we could not hope, nor shall we try, to draw general attention to compositions, the neglect of which is both the effect and evidence of their worthlessness. But there are in many libraries, manuscripts of great value, which reasons not at all discreditable to the authors have prevented from passing through the press, and it is our design to make some of them more known than they have hitherto been. Since our countrymen in India have so vigorously pushed their inquiries into the literature of Asia, the mines of poetry which they have laid open, have been nearly monopolized by the discoverers, while European scholars have held back from the

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