A Letter Book

An active faith so highly did advance,
That she once knew, more than the church did know,
The Resurrection! so much good there is
Delivered of her, that some Fathers be
Loath to believe one woman could do this;
But think these Magdalens were two or three.
Increase their number, Lady, and their fame:
To their devotion, add your innocence;
Take so much of the example as the name
The latter half – and in some recompense
That they did harbour Christ Himself – a guest
Harbour these Hymns, to His dear Name addressed.

8. To The Lady Magdalen Herbert

Madam,

Every excuse hath in it somewhat of accusation; and since I am innocent, and yet must excuse, how shall I do for that part of accusing. By my troth, as desperate and perplexed men, grow from thence bold; so must I take the boldness of accusing you, who would draw so dark a Curtain betwixt me and your purposes, as that I had no glimmering, neither of your goings, nor the way which my Letters might haunt. Yet, I have given this Licence to Travel, but I know not whither, nor it. It is therefore rather a Pinnace to discover; and the entire Colony of Letters, of Hundreds and Fifties, must follow; whose employment is more honourable, than that which our State meditates to Virginia because you are worthier than all that Country, of which that is a wretched inch; for you have better treasure and a harmlessness. If this sound like a flattery, tear it out. I am to my Letters as rigid a Puritan as Caesar was to his Wife. I can as ill endure a suspicious and misinterpretable word as a fault; and of the grossest flatteries there is this good use, that they tell us what we should be. But, Madam, you are beyond instruction, and therefore there can belong to you only praise; of which, though you be no good hearer, yet allow all my Letters leave to have in them one part of it, which is thankfulness towards you.

    Your unworthiest Servant
    Except your accepting
    have mended him
    John Donne.

Mitcham, July 11, 1607.

9. To the worthiest Lady, Mrs. Magdalen Herber(t)

Madam,

This is my second Letter, in which though I cannot tell you what is good, yet this is the worst, that I must be a great part of it; yet to me, that is recompensed, because you must be mingled. After I knew you were gone (for I must, little less than accusingly tell you, I knew not you would go) I sent my first Letter, like a Bevis of Hampton, to seek Adventures. This day I came to Town, and to the best part of it, your House; for your memory is a State-cloth and Presence; which I reverence, though you be away; though I need not seek that there which I have about and within me. There, though I found my accusation, yet anything to which your hand is, is a pardon; yet I would not burn my first Letter, because as in great destiny no small passage can be omitted or frustrated, so in my resolution of writing almost daily to you, I would have no link of the Chain broke by me, both because my Letters interpret one another, and because only their number can give them weight. If I had your Commission and Instructions to do you the service of a Legier Ambassador here, I could say something of the Countess of Devon: of the States, and such things. But since to you, who are not only a World alone, but the Monarchy of the World your self, nothing can be added, especially by me; I will sustain myself with the honour of being

    Your Servant Extraordinary
    And without place
    John Donne.

London

July 23, 1607

10. To the worthiest Lady, Mrs. Magdalen Herbert

Madam,

As we must die before we can have full glory and happiness, so before I can have this degree of it, as to see you by a Letter, I must almost die, that is, come to London, to plaguy London; a place full of danger, and vanity, and vice, though the Court be gone. And such it will be, till your return redeem it: Not that, the greatest virtue in the World, which is you, can be such a Marshal, as to defeat, or disperse all the vice of this place; but as higher bodies remove, or contract themselves, when better come, so at your return we shall have one door open to innocence. Yet, Madam, you are not such an Ireland, as produceth neither ill, nor good; no Spiders or Nightingales, which is a rare degree of perfection: But you have found and practised that experiment, That even nature, out of her detesting of emptiness, if we will make that our work to remove bad, will fill us with good things. To abstain from it, was therefore but the Childhood and Minority of your Soul, which hath been long exercised since, in your manlier active part, of doing good. Of which since I have been a witness and subject, not to tell you some times, that by your influence and example I have attained to such a step of goodness, as to be thankful, were both to accuse your power and judgment of impotency and infirmity.

    Your Ladyship's in all Services,
    John Donne.[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.]

August 2d, 1607.

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 - Epistolae Hoelianae or Familiar Letters (1657).] 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 - Indeed his correspondents are probably sometimes, if not always, imaginary: and many of the letters are only what in modern periodicals are called "middle" articles on this and that subject, headed and tailed with the usual letter-formulas.] 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,

Tho' considering my former condition of life, I may now be called a countryman, yet you cannot call me a rustic (as you would imply in your letter) as long as I live in so civil and noble a family, as long as I lodge in so virtuous and regular a house as any, I believe, in the land, both for economical government and the choice company; for I never saw yet such a dainty race of children in all my life together. I never saw yet such an orderly and punctual attendance of servants, nor a great house so neatly kept; here one shall see no dog, nor a cat, nor cage to cause any nastiness within the body of the house. The kitchen and gutters and other offices of noise and drudgery are at the fag-end; there's a back-gate for the beggars and the meaner sort of swains to come in at; the stables butt upon the park, which, for a cheerful rising ground, for groves and browsings for the deer, for rivulets of water, may compare with any of its bigness in the whole land; it is opposite to the front of the great house, whence from the gallery one may see much of the game when they are a-hunting. Now for the gardening and costly choice flowers, for ponds, for stately large walks green and gravelly, for orchards and choice fruits of all sorts, there are few the like in England; here you have your Bon Chrétien pear and Burgamot in perfection; your Muscadel grapes in such plenty that there are some bottles of wine sent every year to the King: and one Mr. Daniel, a worthy gentleman hard by who hath been long abroad, makes good store in his vintage. Truly this house of Long Melford tho' it be not so great, yet is so well compacted and contriv'd with such dainty conveniences every way; that if you saw the landskip of it, you would be mightily taken with it and it would serve for a choice pattern to build and contrive a house by. If you come this summer to your Manor of Sheriff in Essex, you will not be far off hence; if your occasions will permit, it will be worth your coming hither, tho' it be only to see him, who would think it a short journey to go from St. David's Head to Dover Cliffs to see and serve you, were there occasion; if you would know who the same is, 'tis —

    Yours,
    J. H.

20. May, 1619.

12. To Mr. E. D.

Sir,

I thank you a thousand times for the noble entertainment you gave me at Bury; and the pains you took in showing me the antiquities of that place. In requital, I can tell you of a strange thing I saw lately here, and I believe 'tis true. As I passed by St. Dunstan's in Fleet Street the last Saturday, I stepped into a lapidary, or stone-cutter's shop, to treat with the master for a stone to be put upon my father's tomb; and casting my eyes up and down, I might spy a huge marble with a large inscription upon't, which was thus to my best remembrance:

Here lies John Oxenham, a goodly young man, in whose chamber, as he was struggling with the pangs of death, a bird with a white breast was seen fluttering about his bed, and so vanished.

Here lies also Mary Oxenham, the sister of the said John, who died the next day, and the said apparition was seen in the room.

Then another sister is spoke of, then,

Here lies hard by James Oxenham, the son of the said John, who died a child in his cradle a little after; and such a bird was seen fluttering about his head, a little before he expired, which vanished afterwards.

At the bottom of the stone there is:

Here lies Elizabeth Oxenham the mother of the said John, who died sixteen years since, when such a bird with a white breast was seen about her bed before her death.

To all these there be divers witnesses, both squires and ladies, whose names are engraven upon the stone. This stone is to be sent to a town hard by Exeter, where this happened. Were you here, I could raise a choice discourse with you hereupon. So, hoping to see you the next term, to requite some of your favours,

I rest —

Your true friend to serve you,

    J. H.

Westminster, 3 July. 1632

JOHN EVELYN (1620-1706)

As is naturally the case with writers of "Diaries," "Memoirs," "Autobiographies," and the like, a good deal of matter is deflected into Evelyn's famous Diary from possible letters: while his numerous and voluminous published works may also to some extent abstract from or duplicate his correspondence. But there is enough of this[98 - Some 400 pages from and to him in the most compendious edition.] to make him a noteworthy epistoler. And it is interesting, though not perhaps surprising, to find that while his Diary is less piquant than his friend Mr. Pepys's, his letters are more so. Not surprising – first, because official letter-writers (Evelyn did a good deal of public work but was never exactly an official) often get into a habit of noncommittal; and secondly, because there is, in these things as in others, a principle of compensation. Evelyn was almost sure to be a good letter-writer[99 - He thought, writing to Lord Spencer about 1690, that we have "few tolerable letters of our own country" excepting – and that only in a fashion – those of Bacon, Donne and Howell.] for he had a ready pen, a rather extraordinary range of interests and capacities, plenty of time and means, extensive knowledge of the world, and last but not least, a tendency – not missed by the aforesaid Mr. Pepys – to bestow his information and opinion freely upon less fortunately endowed and equipped mortals. If he never quite reaches in letters the famous passages of the Diary, describing the great Fire, and Whitehall on the eve of Charles the Second's mortal seizure, he sometimes comes near to this, and diffuses throughout a blend of humanism, and humanity, of science and art, which is very agreeable. His wife also was no mean letter-writer, but only one of the minor stars of that day round the moon, Dorothy Osborne, to whom we come next. Of Evelyn's own letters several are specially tempting. His curious plan (a particularly favourite craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) for a small "college" or lay convent of ladies and gentlemen, a sort of miniature "Abbey of Thelema" is one. His magnificent eulogy of the Duchess of Newcastle (Lamb's "dear Margaret"), which puzzled his editor Bray (from this and other notes a rather stupid man), is another: and his very interesting letter to Pepys on Dreams (Oct. 4, 1689) a third. But on the whole I have preferred the following, which may remind some readers of Mr. Kipling's charming poem on the wonderful things our fathers did and believed, with its invaluable reminder that after all it would be lucky for us if we were no worse than they. The date is not given: but the letter is printed between one of August and one of September, 1668. κολλούριον = Collyrium = "eyewash." "Stillatim" = "drop by drop." "Lixivium" (Fr. "lessive") = "lye," "soapwater." "Catoptrics" and "otacoustics" (though the "ot" = "ear" has gone) – are fairly modern words, "phonocamptics" scarcely so. In fact, I do not remember seeing it elsewhere. It does not appear to be a classical Greek compound, but should mean "the art of guiding and managing the voice."[100 - "Odorumque canum vis– as Lucretius expresses it" – perhaps requires a note. Evelyn ought to have known his Lucretius, the first book of which he translated and which he was only prevented from completing by some foolish scruples which Jeremy Taylor wisely but vainly combated. And Lucretius is fond of vis as meaning "quality" or "faculty." But Evelyn almost certainly was thinking also, more or less, of Virgil's "odora canum vis," Aen. iv. 132.] The Tom Whittal story shows that Evelyn, though given to seriousness, could (God rest his soul) be a merry man sometimes. The other proper names, from Mr. Oldenburg to Thom. Fazzello, could be expounded without difficulty, but with unnecessary expenditure of space.

13. John Evelyn to Doctor Beale