August 2d, 1607.
FOOTNOTES:
[94] Mr. Gosse (who has inserted them in his Life and Letters of Donne) is perhaps right in putting letter 7 last. I give no opinion on this but merely keep the order in which they originally appeared in the text and in an appendix to the Life of Herbert (1670 edit.). I am not certain to which "first" the "second" in letter 9 refers. "Bevis of Hampton" generally for "knight errant"; "Legier," a resident Ambassador; "States" in the plural—always then "the Dutch"; Snakelessness is more often assigned to Ireland than spiderlessness.
[95] The first of these letters, with the sonnet, appears, I think, in all editions of Walton, who has apparently entered the date wrongly. The other three were copied for me from the 1670 original by Miss Elsie Hitchcock, I have slightly modernised a few spellings in them.
JAMES HOWELL (1593-1666)
"The Father" of something is an expression in the history of literature which has become, more justly than some other traditional expressions, rather odious to the modern mind. For in the first place it is an irritatingly conventional phrase, and in the second the paternity is usually questionable. But "the priggish little clerk of the Council," as Thackeray (who nevertheless loved his letters) calls Howell, does really seem to deserve the fathership of all such as in English write unofficial letters "for publication."[96] He wrote a great deal else: and would no doubt in more recent times have been a "polygraphic" journalist of some distinction. And he had plenty to write about. He was an Oxford man; he travelled abroad on commercial errands (though by no means as what has been more recently called a "commercial traveller"); he was one of Ben Jonson's "sons," a Royalist sufferer from the Rebellion, and finally Historiographer Royal as well as Clerk to the Council. His letters, which are sometimes only titularly such[97] but sometimes quite natural, deal with all sorts of subjects—from the murder of Buckingham by Felton to the story of the Oxenham "White Bird" which Kingsley has utilised in Westward Ho! And, to do him justice, there is a certain character about the book which is not merely the expression of the character of the writer, though no doubt connected with it. Now the possession of this is what makes a book literature. It has been usual to select from Howell's letters of travel, and from historical ones like the Buckingham one above mentioned. I have preferred the "White Bird"; and before it one of several documents, of the same or nearly the same period, which deal with the old English life of country houses—between the mediaeval time and the degradation of the "servant" class, which came in with the eighteenth century or a little earlier. Howell would evidently have echoed Isopel Berners—that admirable girl whom George Borrow slighted—in saying, "Long Melford for ever!" though the house would not with him, as with her, have meant a workhouse. Neither letter seems to require annotation.
11. To Dan Caldwell, Esq., from the Lord Savage's House in Long Melford
My dear Dan,