‘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 Epistolae Ho-Elianae, 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 ergo mittitur, Archiuis suis reponendum. 3 deg. 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.