In the second appendix I discuss certain points about the date and authorship of The State of Christendom (published under Sir Henry Wotton's name in 1657), which could not be adequately treated in the narrative of his life. The third appendix contains all the important information which I have gathered about Wotton's friends and correspondents. As the lives of many of these appear in The Dictionary of National Biography, a reference to its pages is often sufficient, though I am able sometimes to supplement the information contained in that screwbat treasure-house of facts. Of those who are not mentioned in this "nvalid great dictionary I have attempted to give a more complete account. Sir Henry Wotton belonged to a group of cultivated men, who shared his tastes and interests, and to know him we must know his friends as well. The fourth appendix contains a list of Italian books compiled by Wotton, and extracts from the commonplace book of one of Wotton's secretaries-a Character of the first Earl of Salisbury, and notes of the ambassador's table-talk and witty sayings.

Sir Henry Wotton's correspondence divides itself into three periods. In the first we have a record of the life of a young Oxford man abroad in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In the second period the 'poor younger brother' has become a diplomatist charged with weighty and important negotiations. Wotton was sent as special ambassador, once to Holland, and once to Vienna, in the troubled times before the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War, to try to avert the impending conflict. On the first occasion he saw much of the great Dutch leaders, Barneveldt and Count Maurice of Nassau; on the second he negotiated with the Catholic Princes, Maximilian of Bavaria and the Emperor Ferdinand II. He was also twice accredited to the Duke of Savoy; but it was at Venice that he lived as resident ambassador, and the main part of his diplomatic activity is connected with Venice and Italy, in which country he was for many years the only English envoy. Although most of the negotiations between Venice and England were not of great importance, there are incidents in his career as ambassador in Italy which still possess considerable historic interest. Chief among these is the support he was empowered to offer the

Venetians in their famous quarrel with the Pope-one of the most courageous and successful actions in James I's not very courageous or successful foreign policy-and the subsequent attempt, in secret combination with certain Venetians, the chief of whom was the great historian and statesman, Paolo Sarpi, to introduce religious reform into Venice.

A study of Wotton's papers throws considerable light on the hitherto obscure history of this movement, and especially on the delicate and much-debated question of Paolo Sarpi's connexion with it. As an attack made on the Pope almost in his own country, in the midst of the Catholic Reaction, by members of the English Church, under the guidance and advice of a Servite friar, who was the greatest of living Italians, this movement deserves to be better known.

Of more general interest, perhaps, is the contribution which I hope these volumes will make to our knowledge of English diplomacy-a subject which has not yet found its historian. Wotton's letters and dispatches give an intimate picture of an English ambassador's life in the time of Shakespeare; how he travelled, how he lived in the place of his charge, of whom his household was composed, and how such diverse duties as kidnapping and religious propaganda, the robbing of the posts and the suppression of pirates, were all part of his official occupation.

The materials in printed books and manuscripts for the study of Wotton's life seem extremely abundant, when we consider the scanty information which has come down to us about many of the great Elizabethans. That his diplomatic papers should have been preserved is not surprising; but that nearly fifty letters should remain, written between 1589 and 1593, from Wotton's twenty-second to his twenty-sixth year, when he was an obscure youth wandering about Europe, is somewhat remarkable, if we remember that James Spedding, with all his research, was only able to find seven letters written in the same early period of Francis Bacon's life. For Wotton's career as an ambassador, the mass of material becomes almost unmanageable; and, indeed, the difficulty of his biographer is not lack of information, but the means of condensing it into a book of reasonable proportions. This is particularly the case with regard to his life in Italy. In travel

ling to Venice he went into the province, and came under the observation of a government, whose officials were, for many centuries, the memoir-writers of Europe. In the famous archives of Venice are preserved full accounts of all his negotiations with that State. Sir Henry Wotton was not only a charming letter-writer, but a witty and accomplished orator as well, and not the least interesting of the documents in these archives are the verbatim reports, taken down by shorthand, of many hundreds of the speeches of this ambassador, who was a distinguished man of letters in the greatest age of English literature. These speeches are, of course, in Italian, a language almost as familiar to Wotton as his own; those for the period of Wotton's first embassy, from 1604 to 1610, have been transcribed and translated by Mr. Horatio Brown in the tenth and eleventh volumes of the Calendar of Venetian State Papers. I have made extensive use of these admirably edited Calendars in my notes, and only regret that for the period of Wotton's two later embassies I am compelled to rely on my own transcripts from the Venice archives. The correspondence of De Fresnes-Canaye, who was French ambassador at Venice for some years after Wotton's arrival, has been published; that of the Tuscan residents there, Montauto and Sachetti, I have examined in the Florence archives. From these sources, from Wotton's dispatches, and other documents in the Record Office, from letters written by his chaplain Bedell, and other members of his household, I have endeavoured to create a living and vivid picture of Sir Henry Wotton's life and activities in Venice. If I have not succeeded in my attempt, the fault must be my own.

To the third and last period, the period of Wotton's life at Eton, belong the letters which possess perhaps the most personal and literary charm. The courtier and man of the world had returned to the books and religious thoughts he had never really deserted; and the correspondence of this time, with Izaak Walton's account of the Provost's days and conversation, gives a picture

gentle, pious, old age, spent among congenial friends and beautiful surroundings, which one would find it hard to equal in any literature.

A word remains to be said concerning the secondary sources of

information about Sir Henry Wotton. His life has been written seven times, but never at great length, or by any one who has availed himself of Wotton's extant correspondence, and all the other manuscript sources of information. Izaak Walton's famous and inimitable biography is mainly a portrait of Wotton in his old age; and although Walton gives a short sketch of Wotton's earlier career, his information is plainly of a hearsay character, and often inaccurate and confused. I cannot find that he made use of more than one or two of the letters which he himself had printed, even when in the second edition of the Reliquiae he added a number of pages to the biography prefixed to the first edition. But it would be pedantry to ask for dates and accurate statements from Izaak Walton, who could give in his own way, and his own golden style, something of such infinitely greater value- the conversation, the character, and the very soul of the man about whom he wrote. Save for the last years, therefore, of Wotton's life, when Walton was his friend and often saw him, I do not place much reliance on his statements about dates and facts.

The eighteenth-century life of Sir Henry Wotton in the Biographia Britannica (1740) is of some interest, and adds a few facts and dates to Izaak Walton's account. The next on the list is the Rev. John Hannah's scholarly little book, Poems by Sir Henry Wotton, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Others, published in 1845. This is the most important piece of research on the subject that has yet been made. It gives the result of a considerable amount of original investigation; and is particularly valuable for the bibliography and variant readings of the poems which it contains, and for the indication of letters by Wotton among the Bodleian manuscripts. As the portion of the book containing a full account of the poems by Wotton, and the poems attributed to him, has been reprinted under the title of The Courtly Poets (1870), I have not included in these volumes any discussion of Wotton's poems, or the poems themselves, except where I have been able to add to the information collected by Mr. Hannah.

In 1866 Mr. (afterwards Sir) Thomas Duffus Hardy published, as Deputy Keeper of the Record Office, a Report on the Documents

in the Archives and Public Libraries in Venice, from Mr. Rawdon Brown's transcripts, which contained a good deal of fresh information about Wotton's career in Venice. Both these two volumes, and the life in the Biographia Britannica, appear, however, to have escaped the notice of Sir Henry Wotton's subsequent biographers.

In 1898 Dr. Adolphus W. Ward published Sir Henry Wotton, a Biographical Sketch. This is more of a literary appreciation than a biography; and while interesting on account of Dr. Ward's wide knowledge of the period, makes little claim to original research. In 1899 Mr. A. W. Fox included in his Book of Bachelors a life of Wotton which is of value for the references to the published correspondence of Wotton's contemporaries, Casaubon's letters, the Winwood Memorials, the reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and many other volumes.

An article in the Edinburgh Review for April, 1899, is a sympathetic appreciation of Wotton's character; and its author moreover has examined Wotton's letters and dispatches in the Record Office, and those preserved at Eton (which were published by the Roxburghe Club in 1850), and made use of the information contained in these documents. Mr. Sidney Lee's article in the Dictionary of National Biography is in the main a restatement of the information gathered by Dr. Ward and Mr. Fox, with however some additional references to printed sources. Both for the indication of sources, and for the general point of view, I am under a debt of obligation to these authorities. It is hardly necessary to say that Professor Gardiner's great history of this period has been of the greatest assistance to me in many ways.

The new material of importance in these volumes may be briefly indicated. To Izaak Walton's account of Wotton's boyhood and Oxford life I have not been able to make fresh additions of any importance. For his first journey abroad, from 1589 to 1594, the only source of information hitherto available is the collection of letters to Lord Zouche printed in the fourth edition of the Reliquiae. I have reprinted with notes all of these which come within the scheme of this work, and have added to them six hitherto unpublished letters of considerable importance, as well as some references to him in the correspondence of friends he