Characters from the Histories & Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century
History
Characters from the Histories & Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century
Great Britain -- Biography; Great Britain -- History -- Stuarts, 1603-1714
'The Life of the Honourable Author' serves as introduction to this
volume of Bacon's literary remains. It runs to fourteen pages,
unnumbered. The passage quoted from this life (_c1v-c2v_) is of the
nature of a character.
Rawley's work is disfigured by pedantically heavy punctuation. He
carried to absurd excess the methods which his Master adopted in the
1625 edition of his _Essays_. It has not been thought necessary to
retain all his commas.
Page 41, l. 4. _Et quod tentabam_, &c. Ovid, _Tristia_, IV. x. 26.
12.
Clarendon, MS. Life, p. 48; _Life_, ed. 1759, p. 16.
Page 42, l. 23. _M'r Cowly_, an indication of Cowley's fame among his
contemporaries. This was written in 1668, after the publication of
_Paradise Lost_, but Clarendon ignores Milton.
l. 25. _to own much of his_, 'to ascribe much of this' _Life_ 1759.
Page 43, l. 2. _M'r Hyde_, Clarendon himself.
13.
A New Volume of Familiar Letters, Partly Philosophicall, Politicall,
Historicall. The second Edition, with Additions. By James Howell, Esq.
London, 1650. (Letter XIII, pp. 25-6.)
This is the second volume of _Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ_, first published
1645 (vol. 1) and 1647 (vol. 2). The text is here printed from the
copy of the second edition which Howell presented to Selden with an
autograph dedication: 'Ex dono Authoris ... Opusculum hoc honoris ergô
mittitur, Archiuis suis reponendum. 3° non: Maij 1652.' The volume now
reposes in the Selden collection in the Bodleian library. The second
edition of this letter differs from the first in the insertion of the
bracketed words, ll. 22, 23, and the date.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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