“he should do exactly and not carelessly: For letters are the ideas and truest mirrors of the mind; they show the inside of a man and how he improveth himself.” _Wotton and Walton._ Another great traveller of these times--but one whose dignities would, I suspect have kept him away from the Devil Tavern--was Sir Henry Wotton.[35] He was a man who had supplemented his university training by long residence abroad; who had been of service to King James (before the King had yet left Scotland) by divulging to him and defeating some purposed scheme of poisoning. Wotton was, later, English ambassador at the brilliant court of Venice, whence he wrote to the King many suggestions respecting the improvement of his garden, detailing Italian methods, and forwarding grafts and rare seedlings; he was familiar with most European courts--hobnobbed with Doges and with Kings, was a scholar of elegant and various accomplishments, and the reputed maker of that old and well-worn witticism about ambassadors--that “they were honest men, sent to lie abroad for the good of their country.” He was, furthermore, himself boastful of the authorship of this prickly saying, “The itch of disputation is the scab of the church.”[36] There is also a charming little poem of his--which gets place in the anthologies--addressed to that Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, whom we encountered as a bride at the Castle of Heidelberg, and who became the mother of the accomplished and daring Prince Rupert. Such a man as Wotton, full of anecdote, bristling with wit, familiar with courts, and one who could match phrases with James, or Charles, or Buckingham, in Latin, or French, or Italian, must have been a god-send for a dinner-party at Theobalds, or at Whitehall. To crown his graces, Walton[37] tells us that he was an excellent fisherman.