on which the only commentary I feel able to make is, Oh!
He wrote in all the languages he had. “I would have you know,” he writes to his friend Young, “that I have, though never married, divers children already, some French, some Latin, one Italian, and many English; and though they be but poor brats of the brain, yet are they legitimate, and Apollo himself vouchsafed to co-operate in their production.” It may be doubted whether any of them survived their father except his Familiar Letters, those Epistolae Ho-Elianae which were published and republished in his lifetime, and many times afterwards, have survived even to this day, been favourites with Thackeray as well as Charles Lamb; and are in fact the first of our private letters to each other to enter an admitted chapter of our Literature. If we could hope to see ourselves abreast of France it would be by means of Howell that we should get there. Exactly at the time when Guy Patin was writing his vivacious, very modern letters to his confrère in Lyons, here was our man, quite as brisk and even more modern in tone. Unfortunately for us, France had her Balzac, well under way, and writing in a prose as easy and reasonable as Renan’s. But Howell is strikingly modern compared, say, with Donne or Milton. He reports, for example, that the Prince Palatine has got together “a jolly considerable army”; and to a poetical friend he avows his ambition (on what pretence we have seen) to become a “Lord of Parnassus,” and to be the choice of “those nice girls,” the Muses! It has been said by more than one critic, that not all Howell’s bullets found, or were intended to find, their billets, that in fact letters addressed to Sir K. D., to the Lord Sa., and more explicitly to the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Clare and so on, were really addressed to the air, or the public. It may be so. Others were certainly real enough. There is little doubt, though, that he wrote with an eye to publication. Some of the longest of them are less letters than treatises, and good as they are of their kind, contain none of the additaments which make a letter a much better thing than a library of treatises. By far the greater part are real letters, and excellent letters too. Howell was something of a pedant, something perhaps of a coxcomb. Thackeray called him a prig. Certainly, to address a long letter containing many anecdotes ad hoc and a “Gradual Hymn tending to the honour of the holy name of God” to a ship’s captain upon his “frailty” of “swearing in all his discourses deep and far-fetched oaths,” is the act of prig or coxcomb—but I think Howell was the latter. A prig believes that he can do you good, and the coxcomb desires to air his talents. That was Howell’s simple design, and so I am sure the captain took it. But I should like to know how Ben Jonson, of whose tribe at the Devil Tavern Howell professed himself, took a similar reproof. The burly poet had hurt the feelings of Inigo Jones by putting him in a play as Vitruvius Hoop: whereupon Howell addressed his “Father Ben” as follows:
“You know,
Anser, apis, vitulus, populos et regna gubernant ... but of the three the pen is the most predominant. I know you have a commanding one, but you must not let it tyrannise in that manner, as you have done lately. Some give it out that 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.”
Of his whimsicality I find examples enough to drown in. There is his pleasant tale to a cousin just off to the Dutch wars, of the soldier who had been there and returned, and being asked what exploits he had done, answered, That he had cut off a Spaniard’s legs. “Reply being made that that was no great matter, it had been something if he had cut off his head; O, said he, you must consider his head was off before.” And the other, truly excellent, of that Earl of Kildare who, arraigned before the Lord-Deputy for having set fire to, and burned down, the Church of Cashel, excused himself by saying that he would never have done such a thing had he not understood that the Bishop was inside. But here is from a letter a piece so exactly in Lamb’s vein when he is turning a whimsical notion about and about, and at each turn enhancing it, that I feel sure Howell aut diabolus must have taught it him:
First, the theme—“I was according to your desire to visit the late new-married couple more than once, and to tell you true, I never saw such a disparity between two that were made one flesh in all my life; he handsome outwardly, but of odd conditions; she excellently qualified, but hard-favoured; so that the one may be compared to a cloth of tissue doublet cut upon coarse canvas, the other to a buckram petticoat lined with satin.”
Then, like Lamb, he begins to hang up his conceits:
“I think Clotho had her fingers smutted in snuffing the candle when she began to spin the thread of her life.... A blind man is fittest to hear her sing; one would take delight to see her dance if masked, and it would please you to discourse with her in the dark, for then she is best company. When you marry, I wish you such an inside of a wife, but from such an outward phisnomy the Lord deliver you.”
Phisnomy, or visnomy, is a word which Lamb has made his own.
How often has Lamb held this vein too. “The French are a free and debonair, accostable people, both men and women.... Whereas the old rule was that there could be no true friendship without comessation of a bushel of salt, one may have enough there before he eat a spoonful with them. I like that Friendship which by soft gentle passes steals upon the affection and grows mellow with time by reciprocal offices and trials of love.” And here is an example of pictorial quality which I must not leave out. In the stress of Civil War he writes to a friend in Amsterdam, “While you adorn your churches, we destroy them here. Among others, poor Paul’s looks like a great skeleton, so pitifully handled that you may tell her ribs through her skin. Her body looks like the hulk of some huge Portugal Carake that having crossed the line twelve times and made three voyages to the East Indies, lies rotting upon the Strand.... You know that once a stable was made a temple, but now a temple is become a stable.”