The authenticity of the letters as a whole is discussed in Joseph Jacob's edition, 1890, pp. lxxi ff. This was probably not a real letter written to his correspondent at the given date. But whenever, and in whatever circumstances, Howell wrote it, the value of the picture it gives us of Ben Jonson is not impaired.
PAGE 43, l. 9. Sir Tho. Hawk. Sir Thomas Hawkins, translator of
Horace's Odes and Epodes, 1625; hence 'your' Horace, p. 44, l. 4.
l. 17. T. Ca. Thomas Carew, the poet, one of the 'Tribe of Ben'.
PAGE 44, l. 6. Iamque opus, Ovid, Metam. xv. 871; cf. p. 202, l. 13. l. 8. Exegi monumentum, Horace, Od. iii. 30. i. l. 10. O fortunatam, preserved in Quintilian, Inst. Orat. ix. 4. 41 and xi. I. 24, and in Juvenal, Sat. x. 122.
14.
This remarkable portrait of a country gentleman of the old school is from the 'Fragment of Autobiography', written by the first Earl of Shaftesbury (see Nos. 68, 69) towards the end of his life. The manuscript is among the Shaftesbury papers in the Public Record Office, but at present (1918) has been temporarily withdrawn for greater safety, and is not available for reference. The text is therefore taken from the modernized version in W.D. Christie's Memoirs of Shaftesbury, 1859, pp. 22-5, and Life of Shaftesbury, 1871, vol. i, appendix i, pp. xv-xvii.
The character was published in Leonard Howard's Collection of Letters, from the Original Manuscripts, 1753, pp. 152-5, and was reprinted in The Gentleman's Magazine for April 1754, pp. 160-1, and again in The Connoisseur, No. 81, August 14, 1755. The Gentleman's Magazine (1754, p. 215) is responsible for the error that it is to be found in Peck's Desiderata Curiosa.
Hastings was Shaftesbury's neighbour in Dorsetshire. A full-length portrait of him in his old age, clad in green cloth and holding a pike-staff in his right hand, is at St. Giles, the seat of the Shaftesbury family. It is reproduced in Hutchins's History of Dorset, ed. 1868, vol. iii, p. 152.
PAGE 44, ll. 24-26. He was the second son of George fourth Earl of Huntingdon. Shaftesbury is describing his early associates after his marriage in 1639: 'The eastern part of Dorsetshire had a bowling-green at Hanley, where the gentlemen went constantly once a week, though neither the green nor accommodation was inviting, yet it was well placed for to continue the correspondence of the gentry of those parts. Thither resorted Mr. Hastings of Woodland,' &c.
Page 47, l. 12. 'my part lies therein-a.' As was pointed out by E.F. Rimbault in Notes and Queries, 1859, Second Series, vol. vii, p. 323, this is part of an old catch printed with the music in Pammelia. Musicks Miscellanie. Or, Mixed Varietie of Pleasant Roundelayes, and delightfull Catches, 1609: