the first place, as Mr Smith says, Wotton's poetry has been collected and digested in a definitive form by Mr Hannah, whose elucidation of the poems is generally accessible. Moreover, notwithstanding the exquisite charm of more than one of these pieces, they were to their author mere ornamental parerga of his life, and not an essential part even of the leisure which was his, any more than of the business with which even in leisure his soul was bound up. Of the poetic gem which rightly adorns any corolla of English lyrics-the imperishable lines to the Queen of Bohemia, possibly (as is hinted by Mr Smith) the felicitous elaboration of a Petrarchian suggestion-Wotton's biographer is doubtless well warranted in writing, Neither Queen nor ambassador probably gave, amid the cares of State, a second thought to the little poem.' In general, though the phrase is rather twoedged, he seems to have affected a reserve about his writings, especially his poems'; and this shyness (not uncommon in men of the world in days when 'interviewing' had not yet been invented) led him at a much later date to commend to the Queen of Bohemia, as if it had been by an unknown hand, the exquisite couplet on the death of her former lady-in-waiting soon after that of her husband, Wotton's nephew, Sir Albertus Morton:

'He first deceas'd. She for a little tried

To live without him; lik'd it not; and died.'

Towards the admiring sympathiser of his latter days, in the rich drapery of whose commemorative tribute his more tranquil virtues lie as it were swathed, he could show no such reticence; but the hymn, 'Oh thou great Power,' which, as composed on his sick-bed, he sent to Izaak Walton, is too full of conceits to be palatable to modern readers.

If we turn from Wotton's poems to his prose compositions intended for publication,' we find, as has been generally acknowledged, little that is in itself deserving of very special praise, but much that is characteristic both of the man and of the times. Of the longest and most important among the prose works attributed to him, but published rather later than the rest, The State of Christendom,' his authorship cannot be said to be absolutely certain. Mr Smith has devoted a special appendix

·

to a critical examination of the date and authorship of this tractate. Some years ago (in a letter to the 'Athenæum,' dated June 18, 1901) Mr Charles Hughes, the editor of Fynes Moryson's 'Itinerary,' conclusively showed that 'The State of Christendom' was written, not, as has been generally assumed, during Wotton's exile in 1600 and 1601, but some seven years earlier, being in fact a survey of the current politics of 1594; and Mr Smith has independently arrived at the same conclusion, which must be pronounced incontrovertible. On the other hand, Mr Smith rebuts Mr Hughes' 'inference that, the treatise being autobiographical, Wotton was already at this time a political suspect,' by disproving the former and generally accepted assumption. A comparison of dates leaves no room for doubt on this head. But the question remains whether 'The State of Christendom' was written by Wotton in an assumed character or was not written by him at all. Mr Smith seems rather to incline to the latter opinion, but feels bound, in view of the conflict of internal evidence, at present to accept the former. Thus the question of authorship must, we fear, unless some external proof should opportunely present itself, be left in the nicely balanced condition which is abhorred by so many controversialists.

Among the other prose publications which bear Wotton's name, I am not aware that justice has been done by any previous biographer or critic to the earliest of the whole number (leaving the 'State of Christendom' out of the question). The Elements of Architecture' was published early in 1624, a few months before the competition for the vacant provostship of Eton was settled in Wotton's favour; nor is it going too far to connect book and candidature, since not only was the first copy of 'The Elements' sent to the King, but the second (now in the British Museum) was presented to Charles, Prince of Wales, to whose artistic sympathies it directly appealed, and who did not fail to intervene in the election on the author's behalf. Nothing could be better in its way than Mr Smith's analysis of an essay undeservedly overlooked, but justly described by him as a little book in which the ideals and standards of art current at the time among travelled and cultivated Englishmen can best be studied. Though the theme of

the book is considerably narrower than its title impliesfor it is in fact little more than a collection of notes and suggestions for the construction of a 'great country palace'-the work

'is of interest, not only as the first book on the subject in the English language, but as an exposition of the taste of the most accomplished connoisseur of the time-a time when there was in England a truer love of beauty, and a juster appreciation of art, than there had been before, or indeed than there has ever been since. The reign of Elizabeth was rather an age of great creative energy than of conscious and refined love of beauty. . . . The scattered remains of this period have, however, a beauty which makes us linger, not without regret, on the short moment in English history when it seemed as if the poetic splendour of the Elizabethan age might be crowned by great achievements in other arts.'

On some of these achievements, it may be added, Wotton's successors may, at this day, still look as upon a dream which has, in part at least, been realised; whether the eye of the modern diplomatist turns from the ambitious semi-revival of the Foreign Office to the graceful beauty of the Banqueting Hall on the other side of the street; or whether the Etonian, issuing forth from the great chapel of King's, pauses to glance at what, to many Cambridge men, is the most sympathetic of all the architectural beauties of their University-the Palladian façade by lawn and river of the neighbouring College of Clare.

Mr Smith has also something to say of the 'Survey of Education,' dedicated to King Charles, with a promise, should 'so excellent a judge in all kinds of structure' not accord to the work his approval, to pull it promptly to pieces and condemn it to rubbage and ruin'; as well as of the historical and biographical sketches or 'characters,' which are well-known to all readers of the 'Reliquiæ and of Wotton's detached pieces. Among these the Character of Robert, Earl of Salisbury' (printed in an appendix from the Burley MS. and the State Papers) may safely be included; Wotton esteemed no man more highly than Essex's successful rival. Nothing is so characteristic at once of the eager curiosity of Wotton's mind and of the divided duty' which it was constantly keeping in view, than the fact that few writers of mark in our literature have left behind them so few basketfuls of

fragments-the exception of his letters only proving the rule. The wonder is-but for the nescio quid of hopefulness which seems inseparable from any kind of authorship-that either he or those who knew him best and admired him most should have ever thought him likely to write a historical opus magnum. Of his contemplated'History of Venice' (which, before her archives were thrown open to the use of students, no foreigner had better opportunities of writing than he) nothing seems to have been accomplished by him but the dedication and a fragment, about a page in length, concerning the origin of the city, here reprinted from the 'Reliquiæ with the significant note 'Cetera desunt.'

In his latter days Wotton was charged with the execution of an even more delicate, if less comprehensive task; for in 1629 Charles I, in consideration of an augmentation of Wotton's pension from 200l. to 500l., commissioned him with the composition of the English History'-1001. of the augmented pension to be paid over by him to such amanuensis or clerk as he should employ on the work. Whether the augmented or, for that matter, the unaugmented, pension was ever paid remains uncertain; but the history was never written. Before entering into the description of others' actions and fortunes-which require a free spirit'-Wotton humbly requested the King to reserve for him, towards the discharge of his debts, 'some small proportion' of the income of the Mastership of the Rolls, of which Buckingham had induced him to renounce the reversion, and to appoint him to 'the next good Deanery.' The last word reminds us of a project-for the execution of which one would not have scrupled to sacrifice the 'History of England from Henry VIII onwards '-Wotton's contemplated Life of Donne, to which Mr Gosse refers in his own admirable biography of the great Dean of St Paul's. It is pleasant to indulge in the belief that this design, together, perhaps, with much that passed in conversation between the two friends, was the foundation of Walton's biographical portrait of Wotton's early intimate.

There remain-but, as already suggested, this remainder covers many shortcomings-Wotton's letters, and with them what has come down to us of his 'tabletalk.' The aphorisms, to which reference has been made

above, may, in Mr Smith's opinion, safely be regarded as notes taken by some one in the ambassador's house at Venice; they are too largely political to be likely to date from the Eton days, and have not much savour of the saintly sage whom Izaak Walton has pictured for us, and of whose sayings he has preserved congenial examples. It is the familiar converse of an earlier, more active, and more critically observant period of Wotton's life, in surroundings admirably described in the biography before us, when he was the centre of an almost collegiate society of younger men-the attachés (so to say) of his embassy-ready to listen with respect to the 'modern instances' even more than to the wise reflections of their chief; 'in summa,' as one of them writes, 'we live happily, merrily, and honestly; let State businesses go as they will, we follow our studies hard and love one another.'

In Wotton's letters, as is the case with the conversation of his earlier days, it would be useless to seek to distinguish between the 'private' and the 'public' elements. King James' diplomatists, whose primary purpose was after all to please their sovereign, studied his liking for an amalgam of such wit and wisdom as they could command, and fashioned accordingly their relations' (a mixture of despatch and newsletter), of which the tradition has only in these days of telegrams quite died out in the chanceries of Europe. Thus, not only the semi-official letters which Wotton prepared with special care for his master's own eye and signed 'Ottavio Baldi' (the name borne by him in that secret mission from the Grand Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany to King James VI of Scotland, which had resulted in Wotton's entering the King's service after James' accession to the English throne), but his despatches to Cecil and other secretaries, and to his colleagues at the Hague and elsewhere, are interspersed with the witticisms which fill his private correspondence. Now, nothing palls and, except when tempered with humour, nothing tires, like wit; and, as Wotton's wit was part of his nature, and had been assiduously cultivated by him through life, while his humour was a plant of slower growth, which never fully unfolded itself except under the autumn sun of his years of tranquillity, we think that it is in his later letters rather than in his letters as a whole that he deserves the