tribute of supreme literary excellence which Mr Smith pays to him as a letter-writer. Not that we intend for a moment to deny the excellence of many of the earlier letters, or their uniform brightness of style, due to an extraordinary versatility of mind; to a clearness in the statement of opinion, and of likes and dislikes, which partakes of the 'new' rather than the old diplomacy; to an insight into men as well as things, and that love of character-study which was one of the tendencies of the age; to the gift of being able to make constant and apt use of the reading at the writer's command, and of idiomatic phrases from the languages at his disposal;† and to his wit, rarely futile, though occasionally unfair.‡

The two supreme occasions of his life in which Wotton exerted his powers of epigram did not, curiously enough, bring forth any result of great excellence. The first, to be sure, owes its celebrity to chance skilfully used to the author's disadvantage by a Jesuit 'gladiator' who, in this instance at least, proved himself a deft retiarius. The Latin sentence which Wotton wrote in the album of his Augsburg host, and which Scioppius bruited through Europe, so that it came to the ear of King James, derived more point than it can be said to have originally possessed from his punning English version: 'An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for his country.' But, even so, it must be described as flippant rather than

Wotton was a first-rate hater, and to whisper to him the word 'Jesuit' at any time was to apply the needle to the gun.

+ His Latin quotations are few but to the point; in Italian proverbial philosophy he is thoroughly at home; and he is well seen in French, where it is amusing to meet with such long-lived friends as 'l'appétit vient en mangeant.' In his native language he repeatedly comes near to a touch recalling that of Shakespeare or that of Ben Jonson.

+ His contempt for the poor player (see the well-known letter on the burning of the Globe Theatre) is unpleasant, though usual with members of 'Society' in his age; and his analysis of the spirit of the Addled Parlia ment and its four imprisoned members belongs to the sort of sarcasm which recoils upon its author. On the other hand, what could be better than the comparison of the contention between the Emperor Ferdinand II and the Winter King to the disputation between Job and his friends, whereof the divines note that one side did carry a good cause ill, and the other an ill cause well; or the comparison of himself (in a letter to Buckingham), when he had been superseded at Venice and was left without means of subsistence at home, to one of those seal-fishes, which we times, as they say, oversleeping themselves in an ebbing water, feel nothing about them but a dry shore when they awake.'

witty. Whether or not, such as it is, it can claim to be original; Scioppius gave it immortality; and it was not the kind of good thing likely to escape the conscious or unconscious plagiarist without necessarily gaining in the process. The case is different with the epitaph composed by Wotton for himself,† and thus translated by Walton: 'Here lies the first author of this Sentence: The Itch of Disputation will prove the Scab of the Church.' (It should have been 'Churches.')

This, as Walton allows, may not have been Wotton's own invention, though, as Mr Smith points out, it has never been traced back further than Wotton's own tract, 'Plausus et Vota' (1633); and 'reason, mixed with charity,' should, as the pious biographer says, forgive such a slip of memory at such a time. To later generations the phraseology of the sentence seems incongruous with the dignity of an epitaph. But it testified, however imperfectly, to Wotton's firm belief that true religion is born, not out of theological argument and the factiousness which it engenders, but out of the simple and noble conduct of life. In Wotton himself, as in Fra Paolo, whom he admired above all other men, doctrinal controversy was the least part of the great struggle in which they had their share.

The bulk of Wotton's works (though not quite in the same sense in which Charles Lamb made a similar asser

* It may, as has been remarked, have been originally suggested by the Shakespearean phrase 'spies of the time,' which, with the addition 'honourable,' Jonson in his 'Catiline' applies to ambassadors, and Wotton him self afterwards adopted as what he called an old Kentish' phrase. Massinger seems to allude to Wotton's epigram in 'The Renegado' and in The Maid of Honour' (Act I, Sc. i, in both); and Dryden cites it in his 'Dedication of the Eneis.' Finally, from the Memoirs of one of the most accomplished and resourceful diplomatists of modern times we take the following anecdote: On one occasion, when Count S was dining with Count Beust, and he and others were discussing the good and bad elements which go to make up a typical ambassador, he wittily remarked, "Mon Dieu, Monsieur le Comte, la diplomatie est l'art de mentir facilement et impunément." (Memoirs of Count Beust,' translated by Baron H. de Worms, i, Introd. 1.)

We do not refer to his observation on leaving England for his third embassy to Venice in 1620, as reported by his persistent backbiter Chambers lain to Carleton, that he doth not now owe one peny in England'---' which one of his friends standing by said would be an excellent epitaph, if he could leave it on his monument.'

tion as to his writings preserved in Leadenhall Street) consists of his professional, i.e. diplomatic, reports; and we wish we had space to note, by the aid of so careful a biographer as Mr Smith, how assiduously and singlemindedly the future ambassador prepared himself for his profession. Family traditions pointed the way to it; his training at Oxford, under the eminent civilist Alberico Gentili, who had not long before published the most important book hitherto written on the functions, qualifications, and rights of ambassadors, laid the foundation of attainments which the English universities of the time took pains to foster; and foreign travel, with a sojourn in more than one foreign university (more especially at Geneva, where he settled down for a time with Casaubon), supplied him, as it supplied many contemporaries, afterwards eminent as politicians, with the necessary preliminary experience. But, as this period is covered by his letters to his elder brother Edward (afterwards Lord Wotton, and a convert to the Church of Rome), and to Lord Zouche (one of his associates at the University of Altdorf), which are well known to readers of the 'Reliquiæ,' we pass it by, together with the stormy episode of his connexion with Essex, in whose expeditions to Cadiz and the Azores, as well (as has been seen) in his unlucky Irish experiences, the young adventurer participated.

Having broken with Essex while there was still time, Wotton once more found his way to Italy; and it was only, thanks to a bold venture-the mission which in 1601 he undertook under a feigned name, to warn the King of Scotland of an assassination plot directed against his sacred person that he could once more look forward to being employed in the English diplomatic service. So early as December 1597, he had been in correspondence with Cecil as to a plan of joining him with John Wroth in a mission to the Protestant Princes of Germany; in May 1603 we find him writing to Cecil, offering him his services, as if the connexion with Essex, who had a foreign policy, and almost a Foreign Office, of his own, ought to have done him no harm with the discreet secretary. With pleasing candour (or at least the assumption of it) he dwells on the duty of fidelity,' which he owed to the person of his late master' while he lived, and the duty to

his memory after death,' significantly reminding Cecil that between him and Essex there was no personal unkindness.' In any case, either Wotton's engaging frankness towards the powerful minister, or the King's liking for the personality of Ottavio Baldi,' stood him in good stead; and little more than a year later (July 1604) we find him, again from Venice, but this time as accredited ambassador there, beginning, according to the method of the age, his official correspondence with his brother diplomatist, Sir Ralph Winwood, at the Hague.

Sir Henry Wotton, like most politicians who are not born members of the twenty-four ancient Houses of Venice' (and even these had in his day come to find their descent more of a disqualification than a recommendation for the dogeship), had to make his way in public life against many obstacles, including that of a perennially insufficient income. It cannot be denied that he was borne up in the struggle by many high and rare qualities besides his vivacity of intellect and a versatility of tastes which, at Venice at least (for he was never happy in Holland, and quite unsuccessful in Germany), enabled him, as a diplomatist should, to enter into the whole life of the place, from the pictures in the palaces to the duck-shooting on the lagoons. Wotton was possessed of a high courage, of which the roots lay in unfaltering religious conviction, and from which was derived a tenacity able at times to prevail even against the irresolution of his sovereign. In his methods he was, it is to be feared, quite as unscrupulous as any of his colleagues and competitors. The intercepting of important letters, whether of Jesuit or other authorship, and the kidnapping of obnoxious personages, were expedients in the ordinary line of the diplomacy of his day; even when on his way home from his last Venetian embassy he communicated to the Secretary of State a design for snatching up' a printer named Flavius, who printed long since that filthy false libel "de Corona Regia" (one of Scioppius' amenities to the address of King James). Only now and then was he inconvenienced in such transactions by anything in the nature of a scruple, as when he declined to have anything to say to an offer, by one of the bravi who swarmed at Venice, to assassinate the fugitive Earl of Tyrone, unless his Majesty should be please to command him to proceed further in the matter.

In the case of an outlaw of a different sort, the notorious pirate Ward (who had sent a message to the Signoria : 'Tell those flatcaps who have been the occasion of my being banished out of my own country that before I have done with them I will make them sue me for my pardon '), Wotton was prepared to recommend either a bargain, or the acceptance of the offer of an English sailor, formerly one of Ward's crew, to find out the pirate, kill him, and burn his ships.

Yet some of the drawbacks to Wotton's success as a diplomatist lay in himself. His zeal occasionally outran itself in both great things and small-in the anti-papal propaganda which he almost openly carried on at Venice, and in such a piece of folly as the conveyance of the Milanese Jesuit Cerroneo to England, whence he seems to have returned again, his budget of strange and secret information not having been found 'worth the whistling.' Wotton's impetuousness not only drove him into difficulties out of which he afterwards had to extricate himself tant bien que mal, but also rendered him specially odious to those whose interests his policy crossed. Above all it made him unable to do anything at Rome, as was shown in the case of John Mole, who, having translated some works of Duplessis-Mornay containing reflections on 'Babylon' and 'Antichrist,' was arrested by order of the Inquisition, and died in prison after a confinement of thirty years. Wotton seems also to have excited distrust and suspicion in English friends and fellow diplomatists well acquainted with him, such as his cousin, Anthony Bacon, and his fellow secretary Reynolds, in the days of his service with Essex, and his fellow diplomatist Carleton, whose correspondence with Chamberlain is, in Mr Smith's words, 'full of innuendos and vague accusations against Wotton, or "Fabritio," as they call him.' Of course professional jealousy was at the bottom of much of this; but it is sad to think that so patriotic a servant of his king, so pious and high-minded a Christian, and so 'easy' a 'philosopher' among his books and pictures, should have suffered so much from the corroding influences of the courtier's life.

The ambassadorial services of Wotton, which Mr Smith has for the first time surveyed with the necessary amplitude and illustrated by a sufficient selection from Vol. 210.-No. 418.

D