exceptionally varied, even in that spacious and enterprising age. Leaving England in 1589, he spent some time abroad in study and adventurous travel; he was much about the Court of Queen Elizabeth; he accompanied Essex to Ireland and on his famous voyages; he went in the service of an Italian Duke to the Court of James VI; and when that king succeeded to the English throne, was sent as his ambassador to many princes. Famous in his own day as a 'wit and fine gentleman', he deserves to be remembered as a noble example of that much maligned class, the 'Italianate' Englishmen-one who, with all his foreign culture, never lost the sincerity and old-fashioned piety of a 'plain Kentish man'. Although his services as an ambassador were not always of the first importance, and his longer literary works are of a somewhat disappointing character, he yet may be counted as one of the great Elizabethans, with whom high actions were so remarkably combined with high literary expression. For Sir Henry Wotton was endowed with one gift, that of a letter-writer, which none of his more famous contemporaries possessed. Indeed, the very qualities or faults that stood in the way of his complete success, either as a statesman or author; the witty frankness that caused him to be a somewhat indiscreet diplomatist; a certain desultoriness of mind, combined with a great love of leisure and conversation, which hindered the completion of most of his literary tasks, all these made him an admirable correspondent. And letter-writing was not only one of the great pleasures of his life, but, as ambassador, almost his main duty. Among the somewhat formal and colourless epistles of that age his letters are remarkable for their wit, their beauty of phrase, and the impress of his kindly and meditative nature. His shortest note could not have been written by any one else; his long diplomatic dispatches are enlivened by reflections, epigrams, and bits of personal comment and observation. Sometimes eloquent, sometimes intimate, now informed by cynical but not unkindly knowledge of the world, and now by honest religious zeal, he put all his stores of thought and experience into his letters, in a way that was unique at the time and is unusual in any age. Any one who has read those written in the leisure of Venice or Eton will, I think, agree that it is

no exaggeration to call Sir Henry Wotton the best letter-writer of his time-the first Englishman whose correspondence deserves. to be read for its literary quality, apart from its historical interest. His style, although it may seem at first, to those not familiar with the style of the time, somewhat courtly and elaborate, yet possesses great qualities of beauty and distinction, and much of that quaint richness of thought and phrase which we associate with authors of a later date-George Herbert, Sir Thomas Browne, or Izaak Walton.

Of subsequent writers, Walton owed more than any one else to Sir Henry Wotton, and may be regarded as his disciple and follower. In the Life of Donne and the Compleat Angler he accomplished tasks which Wotton had left unfinished; and he seems to have caught his simple yet courtly grace of style from the example and discourse of the old Provost. The two men, indeed, had much in common; both were lovers of fishing and quiet days; both possessed the same musing piety and serenity of soul; and both were devoted members of the English Church, whose spirit Walton has so beautifully expressed in his Lives, and in whose orders Sir Henry appropriately ended his life, after striving so long as an ambassador for its defence and advancement. Animas fieri sapientiores quiescendo, that minds grow wiser by retirement,' was the motto in which Wotton summed up the experience of his active years: Learn to be quiet,' the text his fellow fisherman wrote at the end of his most famous work.

་

Of Sir Henry Wotton's correspondence enough was printed in the seventeenth century to give him a high reputation as a letter-writer. In the first edition of the Reliquiae Wottonianae, published in 1651, Izaak Walton added to Wotton's essays and poems fifty-eight of his letters. Eight more were added to the second edition of 1654, and in 1661 forty-two new letters, almost all addressed to Sir Edmund Bacon, were printed in a little volume, which is now excessively rare. These, with the addition of thirty-one fresh letters and dispatches, were incorporated in the third edition of the Reliquiae in 1672, and finally in 1685 the Reliquiae was republished with thirty-four more letters, all but one addressed to Lord Zouche, and all written

in the early period of Wotton's life. Izaak Walton seems to have put together Sir Henry Wotton's letters and papers in the Reliquiae Wottonianae pretty much as they came to hand, with small regard to date or order. Little or no improvement was made in the subsequent editions, and the result is extremely confusing. Letters written in the same year are scattered over different portions of the book, many are without date or address, and there are no notes of any kind. No one has yet attempted to re-edit this correspondence, although the Reliquiae Wottonianae has always been prized by lovers of seventeenth-century literature, and the need of a new edition has often been remarked. 'His despatches,' Carlyle wrote of Wotton in his Frederick the Great, are they in the Paper Office still? His good old book deserves new editing, and his good old genially pious life a proper elucidation by some faithful man.' When, for lack of a more competent person I had undertaken the task thus indicated by Carlyle, I soon found it to be one of greater magnitude than I had thought at first. For although in 1850 the Roxburghe Club had published a volume containing the sixty-five letters and dispatches of Wotton's preserved at Eton; and in 1867 thirteen more, preserved at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, had been printed in vol. xl of Archaeologia, much the greater part of his correspondence, and many of his most interesting letters, had never yet been printed, and were to be found widely scattered in various manuscript collections, college libraries, the muniment rooms of country houses, and Italian archives. In the Record office alone there are about five hundred letters and dispatches; others are preserved in the British Museum, the Bodleian, the archives of Venice, Florence, and Lucca. Others, of which the originals have disappeared, have been published in different volumes of memoirs and correspondence. I have found altogether nearly one thousand of Wotton's letters and dispatches, published and unpublished, and it is possible that there are others which have escaped my search. These documents can be roughly divided into three classes, familiar letters, news-letters, and diplomatic dispatches. The familiar letters are generally short, of an

1 Book iii. chap. xiv. note.

The

intimate character, and addressed to personal friends. news-letters are of a type well known to historical students— long accounts of the occurrences of the day, which were sent before the date of newspapers to political correspondents, in exchange for similar budgets of information. The dispatches were addressed to the King or the Secretary of State, and contained the ambassador's account of his negotiations, and his views on questions of diplomatic policy. But any such classification can only be extremely loose and vague. The familiar epistles and dispatches are often news-letters as well, and the political correspondence frequently contains much of a personal and intimate character.

To print the whole mass of Wotton's correspondence would require perhaps ten volumes, instead of the two to which I am limited; and many of the dispatches, which are often of great length, giving as they do the history in detail of forgotten and unimportant negotiations, would have little interest save for special students of the foreign policy of James I. The plan of these volumes can be briefly indicated. I have first of all written a life of Sir Henry Wotton, in which I give an account of the events of his career, and his various interests and activities, based on a study of his complete correspondence, and many other contemporary sources of information. I then print in

full his familiar letters, and many of his news-letters and dispatches, with extracts from others, choosing those which are most interesting and characteristic, or which give an account of the important negotiations in which he was engaged. While printing as much as possible hitherto unpublished material, I have added in their place the letters from the Reliquiae Wottonianae, which are now for the first time annotated and arranged according to their dates. In the successive editions of the Reliquiae various misprints crept into the text; I have collated each letter with the text of the original publication, which I follow in this edition, except when I state otherwise. The printer, however, of the third edition seems to have had access to the manuscripts of the letters, and in a few cases where the letters are more complete I follow this text. The holographs of some of the printed letters have been preserved, and of these I have

collated the text with the originals. As Wotton's letters are here printed partly from manuscripts written by himself, partly from transcripts of which the originals are lost, partly from letters dictated to secretaries with an orthography of their own, and partly from printed copies in which the original spelling is not preserved, I was met with a dilemma in regard to the spelling and punctuation, for which there was no completely satisfactory solution. To give, as is the modern custom, literal transcripts of the letters printed from manuscripts, with Wotton's spelling, punctuation (or rather lack of it), and contractions, the varying orthography of his secretaries and transcribers, and the modern spelling of the printed letters, would have resulted in an orthographical chaos which I might have faced had it not been for the long and intricate numerical ciphers which frequently occur, and which, if reproduced, would have made the task of reading extremely difficult. I have, therefore, adopted what seemed to me the least unsatisfactory alternative; and, for the sake of clearness and uniformity, have modernized the spelling and punctuation throughout, except in the proper names. It is certain that one loses something by the loss of quaint and old-fashioned spelling; whether one does not lose more by preserving it is an open question. In an age like the Elizabethan, when every one spelt according to chance or whim, to reproduce this chaotic orthography is doing a certain injustice to a writer like Sir Henry Wotton, and gives an odd and almost illiterate character to the letters of one who wrote in the fashion of the highly educated gentlemen of his time. But, as I say, the dilemma is one for which (to my mind at least) there is no completely satisfactory solution; I have at least followed the example of the classic in this style and for this period. I refer, of course, to Spedding's Letters and Life of Francis Bacon.

I give in an appendix a list of Sir Henry Wotton's writings, and of letters, printed and unprinted, arranged as accurately as I could arrange them in chronological order, with indications of the manuscript collections or printed volumes in which they are to be found.

1 Any one interested in Sir Henry Wotton's spelling will find his letters and dispatches textually reproduced in the volume of Eton Letters and Despatches, published by the Roxburghe Club, and in Archaeologia, vol. xl.